SEO basics in 10 minutes: how Google finds, stores and ranks pages

SEO means making pages Google can find, keep in its index and choose for a search. Learn the three stages and the four numbers Search Console reports.

Search engine optimisation is the work of making your pages easy for Google to find, worth keeping in its index, and the best answer when someone searches. Google Search Console is where Google reports how each of those steps went for your site. This page gives you the model the rest of the track builds on: three stages, four numbers, and a quick way to tell which stage a problem belongs to.

How does Google Search work?

Google describes Search as three stages that every page passes through in order (How Google Search works):

Crawling. Googlebot downloads pages it has learned about, mostly by following links from pages it already knows and by reading the sitemaps site owners submit. It renders what it fetches with a recent version of Chrome, so text that only appears after JavaScript runs can still be seen.
Indexing. Google analyses the page, groups it with any duplicates, picks one URL from each group as the canonical, and stores what it learned in its index.
Serving. When someone searches, Google picks results from the index. The searcher's location, language and device all change what they see.

Two points from the same documentation are worth keeping in mind from day one. Google does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or show any page, even one that follows every guideline. And it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher. Everything in this track is about earning those steps, not buying them.

What you control at each stage

A page can stall at any of the three stages, and the fix is different for each. That is why the first question with any SEO problem is "which stage?" rather than "what should I change?".

Stage	What you control	Where Search Console shows it
Crawling	Links pointing to the page, your sitemap, robots.txt rules, a server that answers reliably	Page indexing report, URL Inspection
Indexing	Content worth storing, one clear URL per piece of content, no accidental noindex	Page indexing report, URL Inspection
Serving	How well the page answers the search, and how its result looks (title link and snippet)	Performance report

The first two stages are mostly technical and mostly yes-or-no: either Google can fetch and store the page or it cannot. The third is where competition happens, and it is the stage most of your time will go into once the basics are sound.

The four numbers Search Console reports

The Performance report describes how your pages did at the serving stage with four numbers. Each has a precise definition, covered in its own page of this track.

Impressions: how often a link to your site appeared on a results page someone loaded. A result can count as seen without being scrolled into view, with some exceptions. See Clicks vs impressions.
Clicks: how often someone followed that link to your site.
CTR (click-through rate): clicks divided by impressions.
Average position: the topmost position your site held in each search where it appeared, averaged across those searches. See CTR and average position.

None of these is useful alone. Take a guide to choosing road bike tyre widths that earned 4,200 impressions and 126 clicks over 28 days at an average position of 6.4. The impressions say Google considers it relevant and shows it often. The position says it sits on the first page but below the results that collect most clicks. The CTR of 3% (126 ÷ 4,200) is modest, but results that far down are clicked much less than the top three almost everywhere, so the snippet is probably not the main problem. The useful conclusion comes from reading all four together: this page needs to climb a few places, and rewriting its meta description alone would not achieve that.

Which stage is the problem? A quick diagnosis

Most questions you will bring to Search Console fit one of the patterns below. Use the table to decide which page of the track or which playbook to read next.

What you see	Likely stage	Read next
A page you care about never appears in the Performance report, and URL Inspection says it is not indexed	Crawling or indexing	Indexing explained
A page earns impressions but sits at average position 8 to 20	Serving: relevance and competition	Striking distance keywords
A result ranks in the top five but is clicked far less than your other results at that position	Serving: how the result looks	Improve CTR
A page's clicks fall month after month while its position slips	Serving: competitors or freshness	Fix content decay
Two of your URLs take turns showing for the same search	Indexing and serving: duplication	Fix keyword cannibalisation
Impressions fall while position holds steady	Demand: fewer people searching	Compare the same months a year earlier before changing anything

The last row matters more than it looks. When fewer people search for something, every site that ranks for it loses traffic, and editing your page will not bring the searches back. A year-over-year comparison in the Performance report usually shows whether a drop is seasonal.

Shortcuts that cost you later

Because results are earned, there is a steady supply of tricks that promise to skip the work. Google's own documents describe the ones that backfire:

Mass-produced pages. Google's spam policies define scaled content abuse as generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help people, and they apply it no matter how the content is made, AI included (Spam policies).
Fake freshness. Among Google's self-assessment questions for helpful content is whether you change the date on pages to make them look fresh when the content has not substantially changed (Creating helpful content).
Writing to a word count. The same page asks whether you write to a particular length because you heard Google prefers it, and answers that it does not.

AutoPSEO writes articles automatically, so these rules shape how its content engine works. Topics come from searches your site already appears for, from lists you add, or from your own site's sections. Each topic has to pass gates that turn away anything your existing pages already cover, and a model then reviews it against your closest pages before it is queued. Every article follows your site's own format, and by default a draft waits for a person to approve it before it goes live. The content engine overview explains each step.

How to work through this track

The fundamentals take about 45 minutes in total. Read them in order, since each page assumes the one before:

What is Google Search Console?: what the service reports, its limits, and the first checks to make.
Clicks vs impressions: how Google counts each, and what the gap between them tells you.
CTR and average position: how both are calculated, and how to judge CTR against your own data.
Indexing explained: how a URL gets into the index, and what each Page indexing status means.

Then move to the playbooks, which turn the model into weekly work. Start with Week 1 quick wins, which strings the others together into a first week. Keep the glossary open for any term that is new to you.

Before you start

You need access to a Search Console property for a site you run, ideally with at least three months of data so trends are visible. If you have just added the site, Google says data begins to appear within a few days. If you use AutoPSEO, connect Search Console first: every method in this track has a matching report in the app, and the examples will make more sense with your own numbers next to them.