Google Search Console weekly checklist: Week 1 quick wins

Spend your first week with Search Console on five short sessions: check that the pages you depend on are indexed, find searches where you rank just below the top results, find results that people see but skip, find pages that are losing clicks, and find searches where two of your pages compete. Each session ends with one change you can ship. After that, a 20-minute weekly check keeps new problems small.

Before you start: set a baseline

Open Performance → Search results, choose the last 28 days and compare them with the previous 28 days. Write down four numbers for the whole property: clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position. These are your "before" figures. Two things to remember while you work:

• The newest days are incomplete. Google says data usually arrives within 2 to 3 days, and the latest day can still change for a few hours (Troubleshooting data discrepancies). Judge trends on settled days only.
• Search Console counts days in Pacific Time, so a day will not line up exactly with your analytics.

Start a change log now. A simple table is enough:

Every change this week goes in it, and every change also gets an annotation on the Performance chart, so you can see it next to the line later.

Session 1 (20 minutes): are the pages that matter indexed?

Nothing else in this checklist helps a page that is not in Google's index, so start there.

1. In the Pages tab, set the range to three months and sort by clicks. Take the top ten pages, then add any business-critical pages that are missing from that list, such as a new product page or a pricing page.
2. Paste each URL into URL Inspection. Note any that are not indexed, and any where the Google-selected canonical differs from the canonical you declared.
3. Open Page indexing and look for reasons whose source is "Website" that affect pages you recognise (Page indexing report). Ignore reasons that only cover URLs you never meant to be indexed.

Outcome: a short list of indexing fixes, usually none to three. If there are any, they come before everything else; the technical indexing playbook covers how to work through them.

Session 2 (30 minutes): searches one push from the top

1. In Performance, keep three months, remove branded searches (the Non-branded query filter if your property has it, otherwise a "Doesn't match regex" filter with your brand's spellings) and export the Queries table.
2. Keep the rows with an average position between 4 and 20.
3. Remove rows with too few impressions to judge. This is a judgement call: on a small site, 100 impressions over three months (about one a day) is a reasonable floor; on a large site, raise it until a few dozen rows remain.
4. Sort by impressions. For the top rows, click the query in Search Console and open the Pages tab to see which page ranks.
5. Pick three where the ranking page is genuinely the right answer for the search, and decide one specific improvement for each.

Outcome: three pages with a planned edit. The striking distance playbook explains how to choose the edit and when the right answer is a new page instead.

Session 3 (20 minutes): results people see but skip

1. From the same export, take the rows at positions 1 to 5.
2. Compare each one's CTR with what your site usually earns at that position (the method is in CTR and average position).
3. Flag rows with at least 200 impressions and a CTR below about 70% of your usual rate at that position. Both numbers are judgement calls; with fewer impressions, demand a bigger gap.
4. Search two of the flagged queries yourself in a private window and look at the whole results page, not just your result.

Outcome: two titles or meta descriptions rewritten. The CTR playbook has the diagnosis table.

Session 4 (20 minutes): pages losing clicks

1. Open the Pages tab and compare the last 28 days with the previous 28 days. If your business is seasonal, compare with the same 28 days a year earlier instead.
2. Sort by the difference in clicks, largest loss first. Absolute losses matter more than percentages: a page that dropped from 900 to 600 clicks matters more than one that fell from 12 to 3.
3. As a starting rule, look at pages that had at least 20 clicks in the earlier window and lost at least 40% of them. These are the thresholds AutoPSEO's content engine uses for its own articles; adjust them to your site.
4. Click into one page and open Queries with the same comparison. Did impressions fall (fewer searches), did position fall (someone overtook you), or did CTR fall with position steady (the results page changed)?

Outcome: a refresh brief for one page, saying what changed and what you will update. The content decay playbook walks through the decision.

Session 5 (20 minutes): two pages, one search

1. List the 10 to 20 searches that matter most to the business.
2. For each, click the query in Performance and open the Pages tab.
3. If a second URL collects at least a tenth of the impressions of the top URL, look closer. A product page and a category page sharing a broad search can be fine; two articles answering the same question rarely are.

Outcome: one decision for one search: merge, differentiate or leave alone. The cannibalisation playbook covers each option.

What you should have at the end of the week

• Any indexing fixes for important pages, shipped or ticketed.
• Three ranking improvements planned or shipped.
• Two rewritten titles or descriptions.
• One refresh brief.
• One decision about two competing pages.
• Every change logged and annotated, each with a date four to eight weeks out to check the result. Google says a recrawl alone can take from a few days to a few weeks (Ask Google to recrawl), so judging a change after a few days tells you nothing.

The 20-minute weekly check

Run it in the middle of the week rather than on Monday, so the previous week's data has settled.

1. Compare the last 7 days with the 7 before (the same weekdays) at property level. If clicks moved by more than about a fifth, find out which pages and queries moved before doing anything else.
2. Open Page indexing and look for new reasons whose source is "Website".
3. Work through the change log: check every change whose check-again date has arrived, and note whether it helped.
4. Repeat one session from the list above, rotating through them over the month.

How AutoPSEO turns the sessions into lists

Each session has a report in AutoPSEO that does the filtering for you and is not limited to 1,000 rows:

The weekly check can run itself: alerts watch for a traffic drop (by default, clicks down 20% over 7 days against the 7 before), position and CTR drops, index flips and anomalies, and post to Slack, Microsoft Teams or a webhook.

For the articles AutoPSEO's content engine manages, sessions 2 and 4 happen without you. Every day it reads the last 28 days of your searches by page, keeps the searches your site shows up for without a page about them, checks each against your existing pages, has a model review the survivors, and queues the best for writing. Every week it compares each article's last 28 days with the 28 before and queues a refresh for the ones losing clicks and an optimisation for the ones being skipped in search. The content engine overview and maintenance pages explain the rules.