Google Search Console is free and, done right, it is the highest-signal data you will get about your own site.
Set it up
1. Add your property (domain or URL prefix) and verify via DNS or an HTML tag
2. Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps
3. Use URL Inspection to request indexing for key pages
The reports that matter
- Performance — queries, pages, CTR, average position; find pages ranking 5–15 and push them up
- Pages (Indexing) — what is indexed and, more usefully, why pages are excluded
- Sitemaps — whether Google read your sitemap without errors
- Core Web Vitals — page experience issues
- Enhancements — rich-result and structured-data validation
A weekly routine
- Check Indexing for new exclusions
- Filter Performance by country and device
- Improve pages ranking #4–#10
- Fix any structured-data warnings
Start with a clean sitemap
Use the free sitemap generator to produce valid XML, and check nothing important is blocked with the robots.txt generator.