Fazley RabbiYou do not need to buy software to understand how your website is doing in Google. A handful of free tools, most of them made by Google itself, show whether your pages are indexed, which searches bring people to you, how fast your pages load on a phone and whether your structured data can be read. Paid tools add convenience and competitor data, but the free ones answer the questions most small businesses actually have.
Google Search Console: how Google sees your site
Search Console is the most important free SEO tool, because its data comes directly from Google. You first verify that you own the site, usually by adding a DNS record at your domain provider or a small file or tag on the site. Data starts to appear after a few days.
What it tells you:
- Search performance. The queries your pages appeared for, how many times they were shown (impressions), how often people clicked, and the average position. You can filter by page, country and device.
- Indexing. Which pages Google has indexed, which it has not, and a reason for each group, such as a redirect, a duplicate or a page blocked from indexing.
- Single-page inspection. Whether one URL is indexed, when Google last crawled it and how it rendered. After fixing a page, you can ask Google to look at it again.
- Sitemaps. Submit your sitemap and see whether Google could read it.
- Experience and problems. Core Web Vitals from real visitors, plus any security issues or manual actions against the site.
What it does not tell you: what visitors did after they arrived, how many enquiries came from search, or your exact ranking for every keyword on every day. The position figure is an average across many searches, places and devices, so read it as a trend, not a fixed rank. If important pages are missing from the index, the guide on pages that do not appear on Google explains the usual causes.
PageSpeed Insights: how fast a page feels
PageSpeed Insights tests one URL at a time, for mobile and desktop. It shows two kinds of data, and mixing them up causes a lot of confusion:
- Field data comes from real Chrome users who visited that page or site over the past few weeks. It is the closest thing to what your visitors experience, and it is what the Core Web Vitals assessment uses. Small sites often have too few visits for field data to appear at all.
- Lab data comes from one simulated test (Lighthouse) under fixed conditions. It is useful for finding causes, such as heavy images or slow scripts, but the score moves a little every time you run it.
The big performance score at the top is lab data. Do not chase a perfect score. Read the specific suggestions, fix the large problems (oversized images, too many plugins, slow hosting) and watch whether the field data improves over the following weeks. For the metrics themselves, see Core Web Vitals explained. If pages crawl on mobile data, the slow website fix goes through it step by step.
Other free tools worth knowing
| Question you have | Free tool to use |
|---|---|
| Which pages lead to enquiries or sales? | Google Analytics, with enquiry tracking set up |
| Can Google read my structured data? | Google's Rich Results Test |
| How does my page look on a phone? | Your own phone on mobile data, plus your browser's developer tools |
| How do people find me on Maps? | The insights in your Google Business Profile |
| Is my site down right now? | A free uptime monitor that emails or messages you |
| What do people search around a topic? | Google's autocomplete and "People also ask" box |
How to read the numbers without panicking
- Compare like with like: this month against last month, or against the same season last year if your trade is seasonal, such as Eid or winter.
- A dip in impressions for one week is usually noise. A steady fall over several weeks deserves a look.
- A few thin pages that Google has crawled but chosen not to index is common. If your main service or product pages are in that group, it is a real problem.
- Rising impressions with flat clicks often means you are showing up but your title and description are not convincing.
A simple monthly routine
- Open Search Console and compare the last month's performance with the month before.
- Check that your important pages are indexed.
- Run your three most important pages through PageSpeed Insights on mobile.
- Find queries with many impressions but few clicks, and improve those pages' titles and opening paragraphs.
- Write down anything strange and check it again next month before reacting.
Common questions
Are paid SEO tools necessary? Not to start. They help with competitor research and tracking many keywords, which matters more once the basics are in place.
Does Search Console improve my rankings? No. It only reports. Improvement comes from what you change on the site.
Why don't the numbers match Google Analytics? They measure different things. Search Console counts searches and clicks on Google; Analytics counts visits on your site and misses visitors who block tracking.
To set the tools up properly and connect them to enquiries, see measuring SEO with Search Console and GA4.