Search Console is the only tool that shows what Google actually thinks of your site, and it's free. It's also sprawling enough that most people check the traffic graph, feel vaguely reassured or worried, and close the tab.
These six reports answer nearly everything worth knowing.
1. Performance — but filtered
The headline graph is close to useless unfiltered, because sitewide totals hide everything interesting. The value is in the filters.
Compare the last 28 days against the previous 28 and sort by click difference rather than total clicks. That single change surfaces what's actually moving. A page that dropped from 400 clicks to 150 is a real problem you can act on; it's invisible in a total that went from 12,000 to 11,750.
Then filter by page to see which queries a specific URL ranks for. This is frequently surprising — pages often earn most of their traffic from a phrase you never targeted, which tells you what to write next.
2. Queries where you rank 5–15
Not a built-in report, but the highest-return five minutes in the tool. Filter Performance to positions between roughly 5 and 15.
These are queries where Google already considers you a credible answer but you're below the fold. Moving position 11 to position 6 typically multiplies clicks several times over, and it usually takes updating an existing page rather than writing a new one — better title and description, a section that answers the query more directly, a few internal links pointing at it. Compare that to the effort of ranking something new from nothing.
3. Page indexing
This tells you which pages Google has indexed and, more usefully, which it deliberately hasn't. The reasons matter:
Crawled – currently not indexed means Google looked and decided it wasn't worth storing. Usually a quality or duplication signal.
Discovered – currently not indexed means Google knows the URL exists but hasn't bothered crawling it — often a crawl-budget or internal-linking issue. Orphan pages live here.
Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical means Google found another page it considers the better version of this one.
Soft 404 means the page returns HTTP 200 but looks empty to Google. Common on filtered archive pages with no results.
If new posts are sitting in Discovered for weeks, that's an indexing problem with specific fixes.
4. Core Web Vitals
The only place you see field data — what real visitors experienced, as opposed to a simulated lab test. Pages are grouped by similarity, so fixing one template fixes the whole group at once. Changes take up to 28 days to fully reflect, since it's a rolling window. Details on what to actually fix are in the Core Web Vitals guide.
5. Links
Your top linked pages and top linking sites. Two practical uses: seeing which of your content actually earns links, which tells you what to make more of; and spotting when a page with strong external links is buried, so you can pass that authority onward with internal links.
6. Manual actions and Security issues
Check these occasionally and hope they stay empty. A manual action means a human reviewer penalised your site — traffic falls off a cliff and no amount of optimisation helps until it's resolved. Security issues mean Google believes you've been hacked. Both are rare, and both are the first thing to check when traffic collapses overnight rather than declining gradually.
Two traps worth knowing
Average position is an average. Ranking first for a query nobody searches and fiftieth for a popular one averages out to something meaningless. Always look at position alongside impressions.
The last three days are incomplete. Data lags. A "drop" at the right edge of the graph is usually just data that hasn't finished arriving.
A ten-minute weekly routine
Compare 28 days to the previous 28, sorted by click difference. Investigate anything that moved sharply in either direction. Check Page indexing for new errors. Once a month, mine the 5–15 position band for pages worth updating. That's it — it beats an hour of staring at the headline graph.
