Is there a beginner tutorial for Google Search Console?

Yes. Once your property is verified, Search Console is small enough to learn in one sitting. This is a tour of what each area is for, in the order it is worth learning. If the property does not exist yet, start with setting up Search Console instead.

The eight areas

• Overview - a summary of clicks, indexed pages and experience signals. Useful as a landing page, not for analysis.
• Performance - the report you will spend most of your time in. Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, sliced by query, page, country, device, search appearance and date, with up to 16 months of history and a delay of roughly two days.
• URL Inspection - the search bar at the top. It answers one question about one URL: is it indexed, and if not, why.
• Indexing - Pages (index coverage reasons), Sitemaps, Video pages and Removals.
• Experience - Core Web Vitals from field data, refreshed weekly.
• Enhancements - validation for whatever structured data Google found on your site.
• Security and Manual Actions - two reports you want to stay empty.
• Links and Settings - external and internal link samples, plus users, verification, crawl stats and the bulk data export.

A sensible learning order

1. Week one: read Performance with the 3-month range, sorted by clicks, to learn what your site actually ranks for.
2. Then compare periods and switch between the Queries and Pages tabs to see which pages earn those queries.
3. Then open Indexing > Pages and read the reasons for anything not indexed.
4. Only after that, look at Core Web Vitals and structured data.

Tip: a brand new property is not empty. Search Console backfills up to 16 months of historical performance data on verification, so you can analyse the past even on day one. The Indexing and Experience reports do need a few days to populate.

Where to go next

Work through the week 1 quick wins playbook for a task a day, read SEO fundamentals for the concepts behind the metrics, and keep the glossary open for terms.

How AutoPSEO helps

AutoPSEO reads the same property through Google's API and turns the raw rows into the analyses the interface leaves to you: striking distance queries, content decay, cannibalization and CTR gaps, each with an explanation of what the report is doing.