How to set up Google Search Console for a service business website

What does Search Console do for a service business?

Search Console is Google's free tool for website owners. Its overview page lists the core jobs: confirm that Google can find and crawl your site, fix indexing problems and ask Google to recrawl new or updated pages, and see which searches show your site and how often people click.

For a contractor, that answers practical questions. Is the new water heater page in Google at all? Which towns are people searching with your trade name? Did the redesign break anything? Without Search Console you're guessing. It takes about 20 minutes to set up, and it costs nothing.

Search Console doesn't change how Google ranks you, and nothing in it is a ranking setting. It's a window into what Google sees, plus a few tools for telling Google about changes. That's enough to catch the problems that quietly cost contractors calls: a page accidentally hidden from Google, a broken sitemap after a redesign, or a service page nobody ever finds.

Search Console is a separate thing from your Google Business Profile. The profile controls your map listing; Search Console covers your website. You want both.

What you'll need

• A Google Account the business owns. Use the same company account you use for your Business Profile and Analytics. Avoid a personal account or one your web designer created.
• Login to your domain registrar or DNS host (where you bought the domain, or where its DNS is managed). This is the cleanest way to verify.
• If you can't get DNS access: the ability to edit your home page's <head> section, or to upload a file to your site's root folder. Your web person can do either in a few minutes.
• Your sitemap address, often /sitemap.xml on your domain. Website builders usually create one automatically.

Which property type should you choose?

Google's help page on adding a property describes two types:

Pick a Domain property if you can. It catches the www and non-www versions, and old http pages, in one place.

How to add and verify your site, step by step

1. Open Search Console and sign in with the company Google Account.
2. Add a property. Choose Domain and enter your bare domain (no https, no www), or choose URL prefix and enter the full address as it loads in a browser.
3. Copy the verification details. For a Domain property, Search Console gives you a TXT record value. For URL prefix, choose a method and copy the tag or download the file.
4. Add the record or tag.
   • DNS: in your registrar's DNS settings, add a new TXT record with the value Google gave you. Google's verification help says a CNAME record also works for this method.
   • HTML tag: paste the meta tag into the <head> of your home page.
   • HTML file: upload the file to the root of your site so it loads at the exact address Google shows. Google says Search Console doesn't follow redirects when looking for it.
5. Select Verify. If DNS hasn't caught up, choose Verify later and come back. Google says it can take a few minutes or even days for a new record to be visible.
6. Leave the record in place. Google says not to remove the verification token after you verify. Search Console checks for it periodically, and if all of an owner's tokens are removed, other users and delegated owners lose access after a grace period.

What to do in the first hour after verifying

1. Submit your sitemap. Open the Sitemaps report, enter the sitemap address and select Submit. Google's sitemaps help lists three statuses: Success (fetched and read without errors), Couldn't fetch, and Has errors. Google also notes that sites under about 500 pages, with every page reachable from the home page, may not strictly need one, but submitting it costs nothing.
2. Inspect your key pages. Type the full address of the home page and your busiest service page into the search bar at the top. The URL Inspection tool tells you whether the URL is on Google. If a page is new or recently changed, select Request indexing. Google says there's a daily limit on these requests, and that indexing usually takes days and isn't guaranteed.
3. Add your web person as a user, not an owner. Under Settings, then Users and permissions, select Add user, enter their Google Account email and pick a permission level. Google's permissions page describes full users (view all data and take some actions) and restricted users (view most data). Keep ownership in the business.

How to read the two reports that matter most

Performance. Google's Performance report help defines four numbers: clicks (people who clicked through to your site from Google Search), impressions (times your site appeared in results), CTR (clicks divided by impressions) and average position (the average position of your highest result). The default view covers the past three months. Open the Queries tab and look for searches with your trade plus a town name. Those show which service area pages are working and which towns aren't showing up yet. Google notes that the newest data can be preliminary and may still change.

Page indexing. This report lists pages Google has and hasn't indexed, with a reason for each. Google's page indexing help says you shouldn't expect every URL to be indexed, only the canonical ones. Duplicates and redirects showing as not indexed is often fine. Look closer when a real service page shows as crawled but not indexed, or as marked noindex, since the second usually means a setting left on from when the site was being built.

Common errors and fixes

What to do next

1. Connect Bing. Bing's own blog explains that Bing Webmaster Tools can import sites from Search Console and verify them automatically. Then claim your listing with our Bing Places guide.
2. Set up Analytics to see what visitors do once they arrive. See setting up Google Analytics for a service business.
3. Add structured data so Google reads your business details clearly: how to add schema markup.
4. Check in monthly. Ten minutes on the Performance and Page indexing reports catches most problems early. If the numbers point to a website that isn't pulling its weight, our website service and local SEO service are built for that, and the free system quote includes a Search Console review if you give us access.

Frequently asked questions