What Is Google Search Console?

Short answer: Google Search Console is a free service from Google that shows how your website appears in Google Search: which searches show your pages, how often people see and click them, and whether Google can find and index your pages. You don't need it to appear on Google, but without it you can't see what Google sees.

What Search Console shows you

• Search traffic (the Performance report): the searches (queries) your site shows up for, and the pages people land on.
• Indexing: whether Google can find and crawl your pages, and which pages have problems. The URL Inspection tool checks one page and lets you ask Google to crawl it again after you update it.
• Sitemaps: where you tell Google where your sitemap file is. You don't upload the file; you give Google its address.
• Alerts and links: messages when Google finds indexing, spam or other problems on your site, and a list of sites that link to yours.

The four numbers in the Performance report

• Impressions: how many times your site appeared in Google's results.
• Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to your site from those results.
• CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: where your highest result sat on Google's page, averaged over every time it was shown. Lower is better: position 1 is the top.

How to set it up

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google Account.
2. Choose a property type. A Domain property (for example, yourbusiness.com.my) covers every version of your site: http and https, with and without www. A URL-prefix property covers only the exact address you type.
3. Prove you own the site. A Domain property needs a DNS record added at your domain provider. A URL-prefix property also accepts other methods, such as an HTML tag on your homepage or your existing Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager code.
4. Open the Sitemaps report and add your sitemap's address, so Google knows where to find your pages.

Adding a property doesn't change how your site appears on Google. It only lets you see the data, so a setup problem won't hurt your website.

How to read it: our own numbers

Here is what Search Console showed for our own site, leadzap.com.my, for the 28 days from 26 September to 23 October 2026:

Number	leadzap.com.my, 26 Sep to 23 Oct 2026
Impressions	34,465
Clicks	332
CTR	0.96%
Average position	7.2

An average position of 7.2 means we were usually near the top of the results. Yet fewer than 1 in 100 people who saw us clicked. Ranking was not our problem; the title and description people saw in Google were.

That is how we use Search Console. When a page shows up often and sits near the top but few people click, we rewrite its title and meta description first, before adding any new content. Then we wait. Google says some changes show within a few hours and others take months, and that you should usually wait a few weeks before judging whether a change worked.

What Search Console doesn't tell you

Search Console stops at the click. It doesn't show what visitors do on your site afterwards, such as tapping WhatsApp, calling or sending an enquiry. For that you need an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, with those actions set up as events. Look at both together: Search Console tells you whether people find you; your analytics tells you whether they get in touch.

Want a second pair of eyes?

Leadzap Marketing offers SEO services in Malaysia. Ask us for a free SEO audit, which includes a technical SEO check of your site and a report on what your competitors rank for, or tap the WhatsApp button on this page.

Sources

• Search Console Help, About Search Console (free service, what it offers, no sign-up needed to appear on Google).
• Search Console Help, Performance report (Search results) (clicks, impressions, CTR, average position).
• Search Console Help, What are impressions, position, and clicks? (how each number is counted).
• Search Console Help, Add a website property to Search Console (Domain and URL-prefix properties; adding one doesn't affect your site).
• Search Console Help, Verify your site ownership (DNS record, HTML tag, Google Analytics and Tag Manager methods).
• Search Console Help, Sitemaps report (submitting means telling Google where the file is).
• Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool (checking one page, requesting indexing).
• Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide (how long changes take to show).