Google Search Console is free, it is the only place Google tells you directly how it sees your website, and most contractors either never set it up or never open it. This guide covers the five things worth checking, what good looks like for a home service company, and the reports that predict a problem before your phone volume falls.

Set it up properly, once

• Verify the domain property, not just the URL prefix. Domain verification (via a DNS record) covers every subdomain and both http and https, so you stop looking at a quarter of your data by accident.
• Submit your XML sitemap and confirm it returns the page count you expect. A sitemap listing 40 pages on a 300-page site is a red flag on day one.
• Connect it to Analytics and to your Google Business Profile insights so organic clicks, calls and booked jobs can be read side by side.
• Add everyone who needs it — you, your marketing partner, your web developer. Access sitting with a former vendor is a problem you want to discover now, not during an outage.

The five reports worth your time

1. Performance — what you actually rank for

Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, by query and by page. Filter to the last three months and compare year over year, never month over month, because heating and cooling demand is seasonal.

What to look for: high-impression, low-click queries (you rank but nobody clicks — usually a weak title or a missing map pack presence), queries sitting at positions 5–15 (the cheapest wins available, because moving 8 to 4 is far easier than 40 to 4), and emergency or “near me” terms where you should be dominant.

2. Pages — what Google has and hasn't indexed

The Indexing report tells you which pages are in the index and why the rest are not. “Crawled — currently not indexed” on a batch of city pages is Google saying those pages are not worth including, which is a content quality verdict, not a bug. “Discovered — currently not indexed” across many pages usually points to crawl budget or thin templates.

3. Experience and Core Web Vitals

Real-world speed and stability data from actual visitors, split by mobile and desktop. For contractors, mobile is the number that matters — the majority of emergency searches happen on a phone, often on cellular. Slow mobile pages cost you calls long before they cost you rankings.

4. Enhancements

Where Google reports on your structured data — whether your schema markup is valid, and which pages have errors. This is also where you notice markup silently disappearing after a site update.

5. Manual Actions and Security

Check these twice a year and any time traffic falls sharply. They are almost always empty — which is exactly the point, because it rules out a penalty in ten seconds and lets you look for the real cause.

What good looks like for a contractor

• Impressions trending up year over year on service and city queries, not just brand searches. Growth that is all branded means your reputation is working and your search visibility is not.
• Your money terms in the top three — the service plus city combinations attached to real jobs, not vanity keywords.
• Nearly all real pages indexed. A large gap between submitted and indexed pages means Google is declining to include your content.
• Mobile Core Web Vitals in the green, or with a clear plan to get there.
• No manual actions, no security issues, no coverage cliffs after site changes.

The monthly ten-minute routine

1. Performance, last 28 days versus the same period last year — clicks and impressions.
2. Top 20 queries: anything new, anything lost.
3. Any position 5–15 query with real volume goes on the list for content work this month.
4. Indexing report: any new errors since last month.
5. Enhancements: any new structured data errors.

Ten minutes, monthly, catches almost everything that would otherwise turn into a quarter of lost lead flow. If you work with us, this is part of the reporting you receive — but you should still have your own access and know how to read it.

Questions we get asked

Keep going

More frameworks in the contractor resource library, or see what this work produces in the contractor case studies.