Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows how your website appears in Google Search: which searches show it, how often people click, and whether Google has trouble reading your pages. To use it, add your website as a property, prove you own it, and open the Performance report. The data starts after you verify, so the sooner you set it up, the sooner you have history.
About 12,100 people a month in Kenya search for “google search console” (Rank.ke keyword data, October 2026). Many of them are stuck at the first step: choosing a property type and verifying. This guide takes you through setup, the numbers that matter, and one habit that finds new traffic: looking for searches where you rank on page two.
Set up and verify your site
Search Console lets you add two kinds of property. Google’s help page, Add a website property to Search Console (opens in a new tab), explains both.
- A Domain property covers your whole domain: every subdomain such as www and every protocol, http or https. You enter only the root domain, for example
yourbusiness.co.ke, and Google requires you to verify it with a DNS record. - A URL-prefix property covers only addresses that start with the exact prefix you enter, including http or https. It offers more ways to verify, such as uploading a file or adding a tag to your site.
Pick the Domain property if you can reach your DNS settings, because one check covers everything. Pick URL-prefix if you only control a website through a page builder or cannot edit DNS.
Verifying with DNS
- Sign in to Search Console with the Google Account you want to own the data.
- Choose Add property, then Domain, and type your root domain.
- Google shows a TXT record, a long line of text.
- Open the place where your domain’s DNS is managed. For a
.co.keor.kedomain, that is usually your domain registrar or your web host. If you do not know who manages it, ask whoever built your site. - Add a TXT record at the root of the domain with the text Google gave you.
- Go back to Search Console and press Verify. If it fails, wait a few hours and try again, because DNS changes can take time to appear.
Keep the TXT record in place after verifying. If you remove it, Google may stop trusting your ownership.
Use a Google Account that belongs to the business, not a freelancer’s personal one. If the person who verified your site leaves, you may lose access. You can add other users later under Settings, then Users and permissions.
Performance: clicks, impressions, position
The Performance report is the page you will open most. It shows four numbers:
| Number | What it means |
|---|---|
| Total clicks | How many times someone clicked through to your site from Google |
| Total impressions | How many times your pages appeared in results |
| Average CTR | Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage |
| Average position | Your average place in the results; lower is better, 1 is the top spot |
Four habits keep you from misreading it:
- Average position is an average. A page can show at position 3 for people in Nairobi and 12 for people elsewhere. Look at individual searches, not only the headline number.
- A small site has small numbers. A new Kenyan business site may get ten clicks a week. Look at the trend over months, not a single day.
- Impressions come before clicks. If impressions rise and clicks do not, your title or description may not be persuading anyone.
- Google keeps about 16 months of data. If you want a longer history, export your data now and then.
Open the Queries tab to see the searches that showed your site, and the Pages tab to see which pages earned clicks. Use the filters to look at one country (Kenya), one device (check mobile, since many Kenyans search on a phone) or one page.
Find searches on page two
The most useful trick takes five minutes a month. Page-two results get very few clicks, so a search where you sit around position 11 to 20 is a search you almost win.
- Open Performance, set the date range to the last 3 months.
- Open the Queries tab and turn on Average position next to Clicks and Impressions.
- Sort by Impressions.
- Look for searches with real impressions and an average position between 11 and 20.
- Click one query, then open the Pages tab to see which page Google shows for it.
- Improve that page for that search: make the title say the answer, add a section that answers the question more fully, add a link from a related page on your site, and make sure the information is current.
- Write the date next to the page in a list, and check the position again in four to six weeks.
This beats writing a new page for a new search from scratch, because Google already links the search to your page. Our guide on SEO content writing shows how to structure the changes.
Indexing and sitemaps
A page can only appear in Google if Google has indexed it. Two tools in Search Console help you check.
URL Inspection. Paste any address from your site into the bar at the top. Search Console tells you whether the page is in Google’s index, when Google last visited, and which address Google chose as the main copy (the canonical). If the page is not indexed, it tells you why, for example that it was found but not crawled, or that it carries a noindex tag. After you fix the problem, you can request indexing for that page.
Sitemaps. A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want Google to find. Most website builders and WordPress plugins create one, usually at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap-index.xml. In Search Console, open Sitemaps, enter its address and press Submit. The report shows when Google last read it and whether there are errors.
If a page you care about is missing from Google, our complete guide to SEO in Kenya gives the full picture of how crawling and indexing work. For a quick check of where your pages stand, see how to use a website ranking checker alongside Search Console.
What only Search Console itself shows
Search Console has more than most owners open. A few parts are worth knowing, and some are visible only inside Google’s own tool:
- The full Pages indexing report, which lists every URL Google knows and the reason each one is or is not indexed.
- Core Web Vitals, Google’s measures of loading, interactivity and layout stability, based on real visitors. Our post on PageSpeed Insights in Kenya explains the numbers.
- Links, which shows which sites link to you and which of your pages are linked most. Read backlinks explained for what to do with it.
- Manual actions and security issues, where Google tells you if a person at Google has penalised your site or if it has been hacked. Check these if traffic falls suddenly.
Turn on email alerts so Google tells you about serious problems. Check the Pages and Core Web Vitals reports every month or two.
See it alongside your other numbers
Search Console tells you what happens before the click. Google Analytics tells you what visitors do after it. Switching between two tools takes time, so Rank.ke shows both inside your own account. Its Google Search Console page shows Performance for Web, Image, Video, News and Discover, Search appearance, a read-only Sitemaps status (last read, errors and warnings), and an Indexing check that looks at up to 20 of your top pages each run, with a daily limit. A note in the app tells you plainly which reports stay only in Search Console itself: the full Pages indexing report, Core Web Vitals, Links, manual actions and security issues.
It uses your own Google account, so the numbers are yours, and it uses no credits. The dashboard date picker lets you change the period, and Search Console and Analytics figures follow it. To estimate traffic for sites that are not yours, read our post on website traffic checkers.
Check your brand on Rank.ke (opens in a new tab), connect your Google account, and open Search Console to see your page-two searches in one list. It takes about five minutes once your site is verified.
Try Google Search Console on your own brand.
There is a Free plan, so you can start without paying.