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Your Google Search Console Audit in 2025: What the Hell Are We Even Looking At, Mate?
Twenty years in this game, give or take, you see a lot of things come and go. SEO fads flash like cheap fireworks. Algorithms dance a jig that only Google’s truly understands, and even then, I reckon half the time they’re just chucking darts at a board. But some stuff, it just sticks, doesn’t it? Like a good set of spanners, always handy. Google Search Console, or GSC as we usually call it, that’s one of those bits of kit that just keeps on giving, or at least, keeps on confusing us in new and exciting ways. And doing a proper google search console seo audit? Still a bloody necessity, despite all the noise about AI and whatnot making everyone redundant. Heard that one before.
So, you’re lookin’ at the dashboard, aren’t ya? All those charts and numbers, enough to make your eyes glaze over before you’ve even had your first cuppa. Where do you even begin? I remember when it was called Webmaster Tools. Simpler times, maybe. Or maybe we just thought they were simpler because we didn’t have half the data points we do now. Data, data everywhere, and not a drop to drink, as my old man used to say about the sea. It applies to GSC, too. You can drown in it if you aren’t careful.
Crawl Stats: Are They Even Bothering to Knock?
Right, so the first thing I usually squint at, after the obvious performance reports, is the crawl stats. It’s underneath that ‘Settings’ cog these days, kinda tucked away like that spare tenner you forget about in an old jacket. You’d think Google would want us to see it front and centre, wouldn’t you? But no, gotta dig for it. Now, why do I care about crawl stats? Because if Google isn’t even bothering to visit your site, ain’t nobody gonna see your brilliant content, are they? It’s like throwing a grand party and forgetting to send out the invites.
I’ve seen sites, proper big ones too, where the crawl activity has just tanked, without anyone noticing for weeks. Happens. Sometimes it’s a server hiccup, sometimes it’s a dodgy plugin, or maybe your robots.txt has gone rogue. I remember one client, a big retail operation, had a new dev push a change that basically told Google to piss off from a whole section of their site. Sales dropped faster than a lead balloon in a puddle. Took us ages to figure out what was happening, because their own internal monitoring wasn’t set up to spot that kind of subtle, silent killer. We found it right there in GSC, plain as day, once we knew what to look for. Crawl requests, pages crawled, download time – if those numbers ain’t right, you got a problem, mate. It ain’t rocket science, just paying attention.
A Word on Robots and Other Digital Gremlins
Speaking of robots.txt, always check that sucker. I’ve had more headaches from misplaced ‘Disallow’ directives than from a weekend bender in Glasgow. It’s like telling your dog he can’t come into the kitchen, then wondering why he’s not eating his dinner. You’d be surprised how often people block stuff they shouldn’t. And your sitemap? Does it reflect reality? Is it even in GSC? You can upload a new one, tell Google about it, see the status right there. If it says ‘Couldn’t fetch’ or ‘Has errors’, well, there’s your problem, isn’t it? Don’t assume it’s all sunshine and rainbows just ’cause you’ve got a sitemap plugin working on your WordPress. Check it. Verify it. I tell ya, the amount of people who just blindly trust plugins… bless their hearts.
Index Coverage: Are You Even In The Club?
So, Google’s crawling, which is grand. But is it indexing? That’s the next question you gotta ask. Index Coverage report. This one’s got all the colours of the rainbow, red for errors, yellow for warnings, green for valid. It’s like a traffic light for your website’s presence. Errors are the urgent stuff, right? Pages that Google tried to index but couldn’t. Maybe it’s a 404, maybe a server error, maybe it’s blocked by robots. But get ’em sorted. You can’t be in the game if you’re not even on the team sheet.
I’ve seen so many sites where old content, long deleted, is still showing up as ‘Submitted and indexed, though blocked by robots.txt’ or something daft. Or pages that should be live are showing ‘Excluded by noindex tag’. My personal favourite is when someone adds a ‘noindex’ tag to the entire site by accident during a site migration. That’ll put a dent in your traffic. A proper google search console seo audit isn’t just about finding new things to do, it’s about finding the old things that are actively screwing you over. And sometimes, you just gotta accept that some pages are excluded for good reason, like pagination pages or archive junk. Don’t sweat every single red dot if it’s not hurting anything important.
Why Do Some Pages Get Excluded, Anyway?
It’s a question I get asked a lot. Folks look at that ‘Excluded’ tab in the Index Coverage report and their faces fall faster than a soggy sausage roll. Now, a heap of these are perfectly fine. ‘Crawled – currently not indexed’ – that means Google saw it, decided it wasn’t worth the trouble right now. Maybe it’s thin content, maybe it’s a duplicate of something else, maybe it’s just not important enough for their vast index. Happens. Sometimes you make a tweak, add more meat to the bones, and it gets picked up later. Sometimes it never does, and honestly, who cares about that old blog post from 2012 about the benefits of dial-up internet? Probably not many.
Then there’s ‘Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user’. That one sends shivers down the spine of many a webmaster. Means Google thinks it knows better than you do about which version of a page is the main one. And sometimes, they’re right! You might have two product pages that are almost identical, and GSC is telling you it picked one. You need to fix that, or Google’s just gonna shrug its digital shoulders and pick one for you, potentially splitting your ranking power. It’s always a good idea to sort out your canonical tags. Seriously.
Performance Report: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
This is the one everyone stares at, innit? How many clicks? What’s my average position? Which keywords are pulling their weight? It’s the closest thing we get to a scorecard. I always start by looking at the trend lines. Are they going up? Down? Sideways like a crab? That tells you the story. You get a sudden dip? Time to investigate. Usually coincides with some other stuff you see in Index Coverage, or maybe a core algorithm update. Or maybe your competitors just got off their arses and did some work.
I often filter by page, not just query. See which individual pages are doing the heavy lifting, and which ones are just dead weight. Some pages, you pour your heart and soul into them, write a thousand words, get some proper good images, and then… crickets. Other pages, you knock out in an hour, and they go gangbusters. Go figure. The internet’s a funny place. But the performance report, especially when you start slicing and dicing the data by device, country, or even search appearance (AMP, rich results, whatever else they’re cooking up), gives you a real feel for what’s working and what’s not.
The Mysterious Case of the Missing Queries
Ever noticed how GSC doesn’t show you all your queries? Or sometimes the clicks for a query don’t quite add up to the clicks for the page? That’s the way it is. They don’t give us everything. Part of it is privacy, they say. Part of it is probably just Google being Google. You just gotta learn to live with it. It ain’t perfect, but it’s still the best free data you’re gonna get direct from the horse’s mouth. Some fancy SEO firms like Ignite Visibility or Terakech got their own dashboards built on top of this stuff, pulling it all in and making it look pretty, adding their own proprietary secret sauce. But even they start with this raw data. You gotta know how to read the tea leaves right here first.
What about average position? I’ve seen folk obsessed with this number, wanting to be ‘number one’ for everything. Mate, sometimes position 3 or 4 is better if it’s getting more relevant clicks. It’s not just about ego. It’s about conversion. If you’re ranking for ‘fluffy pink socks’ and you sell heavy-duty industrial valves, well, your average position might look good, but you ain’t selling squat. So a google search console seo audit always needs to tie back to the actual goals, not just vanity metrics.
Core Web Vitals & Page Experience: Is Your Site a Dog?
Page experience, and particularly Core Web Vitals, they’re the new darlings, aren’t they? Or maybe they’re just the new stick Google’s using to poke us with. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Input Delay (FID) – all these acronyms designed to make your head spin. Basically, how fast does your page load? How stable is it when it loads? How quickly does it respond when someone tries to click something? My take? If your site’s a dog, slow as molasses in January, people are gonna bail faster than a politician on a promise. And Google knows that.
I’ve had clients, particularly in e-commerce, where improving these numbers has made a palpable difference to their conversions. A few milliseconds shaved off here and there, and suddenly people aren’t bouncing off the page in frustration. Folks like Victorious SEO will preach this till they’re blue in the face, and for good reason. It’s not just an SEO thing; it’s a user experience thing. And frankly, if your users aren’t having a good time, Google’s not going to show your site as much love either. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario, but get the site speed sorted. Get rid of the bloat. Strip out the unnecessary JavaScript. Use decent hosting. Seems simple, but it’s often overlooked.
“My Site’s Green, But I Still Ain’t Ranking, What Gives?”
Ah, the classic question. Your Core Web Vitals are ‘Good’, all green ticks, and you’re thinking you’ve won the internet. But your rankings are still stuck in the mud like a Land Rover in a Welsh bog. What happened? Well, it’s not the only thing, is it? It’s a factor, a signal, a part of the grand tapestry of signals Google uses. Content still matters. Links still matter. User intent still matters. Just because your car runs fast doesn’t mean it’s the best car for the rally. It just means it’s fast.
I mean, I’ve seen sites with pretty average Core Web Vitals outrank sites with perfect scores because their content was just miles better, or they had a heap more authority. It’s not a silver bullet, never was. It’s like saying a chef’s kitchen is clean, so their food must be amazing. Yeah, a clean kitchen helps, but if they’re serving up burnt toast, it doesn’t matter, does it?
Schema & Rich Results: Making Your Listings Pop
You want your listing to stand out in the search results, right? Be a bit more ‘look at me!’ than the others. That’s where schema markup comes in. It’s basically code you add to your pages to help Google understand what your content is about. Product reviews, recipes, FAQs, events – you name it. The ‘Enhancements’ section in GSC shows you what structured data Google’s found on your site, and if there are any errors. If you’ve got errors, fix them. Simple. You want Google to understand your site perfectly.
My advice? Don’t overdo it. Just mark up what’s relevant and what you’re genuinely offering. Seen too many people try to cram every type of schema onto a single page and it just ends up looking like a dog’s breakfast to Google. Stick to the basics that make sense for your business. A restaurant wants recipe schema or local business schema. A product page wants product schema. Makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s not a magic trick, it’s just clarifying things. Agencies like NP Digital (Neil Patel’s mob) talk about this stuff endlessly, and they’re right, it helps. Just don’t expect it to magically catapult you to page one if your content is rubbish.
Security & Manual Actions: The Big Red Flags
This section, you hope it’s always empty. Or saying ‘No issues detected.’ If you see something here, you’re in a bit of strife, mate. A security issue means your site might have been hacked, distributing malware, or some other nasty business. Google takes that seriously, and they’ll slap a big red warning label on your site in the search results. People aren’t gonna click on that, are they? Get it sorted pronto. Don’t muck about with security. It’s like leaving your front door unlocked in a dodgy neighbourhood.
Manual actions? That’s when a real human at Google has decided your site is doing something spammy, something outside their guidelines. They’ll tell you what the problem is – maybe you’ve been buying dodgy links, maybe you’re stuffing keywords like a Christmas turkey, maybe you’ve got hidden text. And they’ll tell you what you need to do to fix it. This ain’t a suggestion; it’s an order. And you have to submit a reconsideration request after you fix it. I’ve had to walk clients through this. It’s not fun. It’s like doing penance. But sometimes, you gotta pay for past sins. A google search console seo audit worth its salt always checks here first. Always.
What’s the deal with all this Google Search Console SEO audit nonsense for 2025, really?
Look, at the end of the day, Google Search Console is the direct line to Google. It’s their way of telling you what they think of your site, warts and all. Yeah, they don’t give you all the answers, but they give you a heap more than they used to. My advice has always been: don’t chase every single metric like a mad dog after a rabbit. Understand what each report is telling you about the health of your site, where Google might be struggling to understand it, or where users are having a poor experience.
It’s not just a technical checklist. It’s a diagnostic tool, a window into Google’s brain, if you like, as much as they’re willing to show us anyway. You can spot trends, catch problems before they become full-blown catastrophes, and measure the impact of your SEO efforts. Whether you’re running a global e-commerce operation or a local chippy’s website, that data is gold. Pure gold, if you know how to polish it up and actually do something with it. The SEO landscape changes quicker than a chameleon on a disco ball, but this tool, it’s pretty much a constant. It’s still gonna be vital in 2025, and probably well beyond, even if they call it ‘Google Brain Wave Reader’ by then. Always check your GSC, it’s the sensible thing to do. And don’t forget to back up your data, just in case. Learned that one the hard way, many moons ago.
