Google Search Console is the single most useful free tool a realtor can install on their website, and roughly 70% of agents we work with have never set it up. It tells you, for every search query that touches your site, how many times your pages appeared in Google's results, how many clicks you got, your average position, and what people clicked through to.
Compared to Google Analytics, which tells you what visitors do once they arrive, Search Console tells you how visitors found you in the first place. For SEO work, that is exponentially more useful.
Setting it up takes 15 minutes
First, go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with the same Google account you use for your Google Business Profile. There are two ways to verify ownership of your site: domain verification (the right way, covers all subdomains and protocols) and URL prefix verification (the lazy way, fine if you do not have domain registrar access).
For domain verification, Google gives you a TXT record to add at your DNS provider (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, whoever you bought the domain from). Add it, wait 5 minutes for propagation, click verify. Done.
For URL prefix verification, Google gives you a file to upload to your site or a meta tag to add. Charcom users can paste the verification string into a field in their dashboard settings; it gets dropped into the right meta tag automatically.
Submit your sitemap
The first thing to do after verification is submit your sitemap. Your sitemap is a file at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml that lists every page Google should know about. Charcom generates this automatically. WordPress sites usually need a plugin like Yoast or RankMath. Without a sitemap, Google has to crawl your site to find pages, which is slow and sometimes incomplete.
In Search Console, go to Sitemaps in the left sidebar, paste in your sitemap URL, hit submit. Within 24 hours, Search Console will report how many pages Google has indexed.
The four things to check weekly
Once your data starts flowing in (it takes about 7 days), there are four reports worth a weekly look.
Performance. This shows which queries trigger your site. Look at queries where you appear in the top 20 but your click through rate is low. Those are pages that need better titles or meta descriptions. A page that ranks in position 4 with a 0.5% click rate is leaking traffic to whoever has a better snippet at position 5.
Pages report. Shows which pages have been indexed and which Google has refused to index. Common reasons: thin content, soft 404s, duplicate content. If important pages are showing as not indexed, that is a problem you need to fix.
Core Web Vitals. Shows the speed metrics we talked about in a previous post. If you have URLs in the "Needs improvement" or "Poor" bucket, those are the pages costing you traffic.
Mobile usability. Flags pages with text too small to read, tap targets too close together, content wider than screen. Fix these before they tank your rankings.
The one query report nobody looks at
Performance has a tab called "Queries". Sort by impressions, descending. You will see a list of searches that bring up your site. Now find queries with high impressions but low position (say, position 11 to 20). These are searches where you are showing up on page 2 of Google.
Those queries are gold. Improving any page that ranks in position 11 to 20 to even position 7 to 10 typically triples its click volume. Pick the top three, write better content for them, build a couple of internal links to them, and watch them climb.
This single tactic, mining your Position 11 to 20 queries, has more direct ROI than anything else you can do with Search Console.