Google Search Console guide for Indian website owners
11 min read · 25-Apr-2024
villagehosting.in team
25 April 2024
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that shows you exactly how Google sees your website — which pages are indexed, what queries bring visitors, which pages have errors, and where your technical SEO is breaking down. For any Indian website serious about organic traffic, GSC is non-negotiable.
GSC vs Google Analytics
Google Search Console shows what happens before someone clicks — impressions, position, click-through rate. Google Analytics shows what happens after they arrive — sessions, bounce rate, conversions. You need both. This guide covers GSC only.
Why every Indian website needs Search Console
India is the second-largest internet market in the world. Google processes over 95% of search queries in India. Without GSC, you are flying blind: you cannot see which queries bring visitors, whether Google can even crawl your pages, or whether you have technical issues suppressing your rankings.
GSC is how you find out that Google has never indexed your contact page, that your mobile usability is broken on 40% of your pages, or that a new Google algorithm update has tanked your rankings.
Step 1: Verify ownership
Go to search.google.com/search-console and sign in with your Google account.
Click "Add property". Choose Domain property (covers all subdomains and both HTTP/HTTPS) over URL prefix when possible.
Verification methods (in order of preference):
HTML tag (easiest for WordPress):
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="your-verification-code" />
Add this to your <head>. In WordPress, use Rank Math or Yoast SEO — both have a field for the GSC verification code under their General Settings.
DNS TXT record (for domain property, most reliable):
google-site-verification=your-long-verification-string
Add this TXT record at your domain registrar or DNS provider. Wait 15–60 minutes, then click Verify. This method works even if your site is down.
Google Analytics (if GA4 is already installed): If you've connected GA4 to the same Google account, GSC can use your existing GA4 snippet for verification. One click.
HTML file upload:
Download a verification file from GSC and upload it to your website root. Visit https://yourdomain.in/google1234567890.html to confirm it's accessible, then verify.
Step 2: Submit your sitemap
A sitemap tells Google which pages exist on your site and how important they are. Without a sitemap, Google may miss pages or index them slowly.
For WordPress:
Rank Math generates a sitemap at https://yourdomain.in/sitemap_index.xml automatically.
Yoast SEO generates one at https://yourdomain.in/sitemap_index.xml as well.
In GSC: go to Sitemaps (left sidebar) → enter your sitemap URL → click Submit.
For custom sites: If you're running a Next.js or Django site, generate a sitemap using:
- Next.js:
next-sitemappackage - Django:
django.contrib.sitemaps
Verify your sitemap is accessible before submitting.
What a good sitemap submission looks like:
Status: Success
Discovered URLs: 247
Last read: 2 hours ago
If it shows "Couldn't fetch" — your sitemap URL is wrong or the file has an error.
Step 3: Understanding the index coverage report
Go to Indexing → Pages. This shows the status of every URL Google knows about.
Status categories:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Indexed | In Google's index, can appear in search results |
| Crawled – currently not indexed | Google visited but chose not to index |
| Discovered – currently not indexed | Google knows about it but hasn't crawled yet |
| Not crawled due to internal linking | Too many hops from homepage to reach |
| Excluded by noindex tag | You (or a plugin) blocked indexing |
| Duplicate, non-canonical page selected | Google chose a different version to index |
| Soft 404 | Page returned 200 status but looks like an error page to Google |
Common Indian website problems:
WordPress pagination being indexed: Pages like ?page=2 or /page/2/ of archive listings often get indexed unnecessarily. Add noindex to paginated archives if they have thin content.
Category and tag pages: WordPress creates category URLs like /category/news/. These can dilute your index with low-quality pages. Either noindex them or improve their content.
Staging or development URL indexed: If your staging site (staging.yourdomain.in) has ever been public without noindex, Google may have crawled it. Check for unwanted indexed URLs.
Step 4: Search performance report
Go to Search results under Performance. This is your most important report.
Key metrics:
- Total clicks: Actual visitors from Google
- Total impressions: How often you appeared in search results
- Average CTR: Clicks ÷ Impressions (benchmark: 1–5% is normal for non-branded)
- Average position: Your mean ranking position across all queries
Filter by country to see India specifically: Click + New → Country → India. This shows your Indian traffic separately from global traffic — important if you have an international audience.
Find your best opportunities: Filter for queries where your position is 5–20. These are pages ranking on page 1-2 where small improvements push you higher. Click on a query to see which page is ranking for it.
The easiest SEO win in GSC
Sort queries by Impressions descending. Find queries where you have 500+ impressions but position 8–15. Update that page to better answer those specific queries. This is the highest-leverage SEO action most Indian sites never take.
Check CTR anomalies: If you have high impressions but very low CTR (under 1%), your title tag or meta description is not compelling enough for Indian searchers. Rewrite them.
Step 5: Core Web Vitals
Go to Experience → Core Web Vitals. Google measures three metrics that affect your ranking:
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): How long until the main content loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
- For Indian users on mobile networks (4G with 20–40 Mbps), images are the biggest LCP issue. Compress images to WebP.
- On shared hosting, server response time (TTFB) contributes. Consider VPS if LCP is consistently over 2 seconds.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): How responsive your site is to clicks and taps. Target: under 200ms.
- Heavy JavaScript — particularly WordPress page builders — inflates INP. Elementor with 15+ widgets on a page commonly fails this metric.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Do elements jump around while loading? Target: under 0.1.
- CLS is usually caused by images without specified dimensions, ads loading after content, or web fonts causing text reflow.
What to do with failing pages: Click on a URL in the "Poor URLs" list. GSC shows which metric is failing and links to PageSpeed Insights for that URL with a field-data report.
Step 6: Mobile usability
Go to Experience → Mobile Usability. Google primarily crawls and ranks your site using its mobile bot. Mobile usability errors directly affect rankings.
Common issues on Indian sites:
Text too small to read: Minimum font size is 16px for body text on mobile. Many older WordPress themes use 14px.
Clickable elements too close together: Buttons and links need at least 48×48px tap targets. Navigation menus on mobile are a common failure point.
Content wider than screen: Usually caused by fixed-width elements (images, embeds, tables) that don't have max-width: 100%.
Viewport not set: Your theme must include <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> in the head. All modern themes do this, but old custom themes sometimes don't.
Step 7: URL Inspection tool
The URL Inspection tool is the most useful debugging tool in GSC. Use it whenever a specific page isn't appearing in search results.
Enter any URL from your site into the search bar at the top of GSC.
What it shows:
- Whether Google has indexed this URL
- The last crawl date
- Whether the page is blocked (by robots.txt, noindex, canonical pointing elsewhere)
- What the page looked like when Google crawled it (rendered HTML)
- Any page resources that Google couldn't load
Force indexing: After fixing a page issue, click Request indexing to ask Google to recrawl it. This is faster than waiting for natural crawling — usually hours instead of days.
Request indexing limits
GSC allows roughly 10–12 URL inspection requests per day and 200 indexing requests per day. Use them on your most important pages after significant updates, not on every page.
Step 8: Security issues and manual actions
Security issues: Go to Security & Manual Actions → Security issues. If Google detects malware, hacked content, or deceptive pages on your site, they appear here. An infected Indian shared hosting account (common with outdated WordPress) will show security issues before you even notice the hack.
Manual actions: Go to Security & Manual Actions → Manual actions. These are penalties applied by Google's human review team. If you have a manual action, your rankings are suppressed until you fix the issue and submit a reconsideration request. Manual actions are uncommon for legitimate sites but affect sites that have engaged in link schemes or thin content.
Step 9: Links report
Go to Links (left sidebar). This shows:
External links: Who is linking to your site. Your top linked pages and top linking sites. For Indian businesses, look for local directories, industry publications, and news sites linking to you.
Internal links: Which pages on your site link to which other pages. Pages with very few internal links are harder for Google to discover and rank.
Top linking text: The anchor text others use when linking to you. If most links say "click here" rather than your target keywords, that's an opportunity to reach out and request more descriptive anchor text.
Setting up alerts and monitoring
GSC does not natively send alerts, but you can:
- Go to GSC Settings → Preferences → enable email notifications for coverage issues.
- Connect GSC to Looker Studio (Google's free BI tool) for custom dashboards.
- Check GSC weekly — set a recurring reminder.
For Indian sites targeting local traffic, check GSC after:
- Any site migration or hosting change
- Theme or plugin updates
- Major content changes
- Each time you publish a batch of new pages
Search Console for non-WordPress sites
Next.js: Generate sitemap with next-sitemap. Use the HTML tag method for verification.
Django: Use django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap for the sitemap URL. Verify via DNS TXT.
Laravel: Use the spatie/laravel-sitemap package.
The GSC features themselves work the same regardless of platform — only the verification and sitemap generation methods differ.
Google Search Console tells you exactly what Google thinks of your site. No guessing, no third-party estimates. Check it weekly and act on what it shows you — that alone puts you ahead of most Indian websites competing in the same space.