Why monthly, and why us
Google Search Console is the one place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site: which pages it has, which it has excluded and why, whether they are fast, whether they are secure, and what people searched to find them. It is free, it is authoritative, and almost no small business owner opens it.
So it is a line on the care plan. Once a month, fifteen minutes per site, the same reports in the same order, with a short paragraph in the monthly note and anything urgent fixed on the spot. Here is exactly what is looked at.
1. Performance: the trend
Reports, Performance, Search results, last three months compared to the previous three. Clicks and impressions.
Looking for: a sustained drop in clicks of more than about 20 percent that is not seasonal. A drop in impressions with steady clicks is usually noise or a Google change; a drop in both is worth a look at the Pages tab to see which pages lost traffic.
Then the Queries tab, top twenty. Are the terms what the business wants to be found for? Are any new terms appearing that suggest a page is ranking for something unexpected? Are there queries with high impressions and low clicks, which means the page appears but the title and description do not earn the click?
Fixed at once: nothing here is urgent. Notable changes go in the note with a suggested action.
2. Pages (Indexing): what is in and what is out
Reports, Indexing, Pages. The count of indexed pages, and the "Why pages aren't indexed" list.
Looking for:
- Indexed count dropping month on month without pages being removed.
- Any important page in the not-indexed list. "Excluded by noindex", "Blocked by robots.txt", "Soft 404" or "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical" against a service page or the home page is a fault.
- New 404s. Pages that used to exist and now do not, still linked from somewhere.
- Server errors (5xx). If Google saw them, visitors did too.
Fixed at once: a stray noindex or robots block on an important page; a 404 for a page that had traffic (redirect it); server errors investigated the same day.
In the note: the indexed count, anything excluded that matters and what was done.
3. Core Web Vitals: is it still fast
Reports, Experience, Core Web Vitals, mobile.
Looking for: any page group moving from Good to Needs improvement or Poor since last month. This report lags 28 days, so a change here reflects something that happened a month ago: a new plugin, a heavy image upload, a third-party script.
Fixed at once: if a group turned Poor, the cause is found (usually an upload or a new script) and fixed. If Needs improvement, scheduled.
In the note: the grade for each page group, and if anything moved, why.
4. HTTPS and Security
Reports, Experience, HTTPS: every page should be HTTPS. Security & Manual Actions: both should say no issues.
Fixed at once: anything at all in Security or Manual Actions is a same-day investigation. A non-HTTPS page is usually a redirect or certificate fix.
5. Enhancements: structured data
The Enhancements section lists structured data types Google found (FAQ, Breadcrumbs, Products, Reviews, Organisation) with errors and warnings.
Looking for: new errors. Warnings are usually optional fields and are left unless they are easy.
Fixed at once: errors on the site's key types.
6. Sitemaps
Reports, Indexing, Sitemaps. Status Success, discovered URL count roughly matching the number of real pages, last read recently.
Fixed at once: a sitemap erroring or not read for weeks.
7. Links, briefly
Reports, Links. Top linked pages and top linking sites. Once a quarter rather than monthly. Looking for a sudden burst of spammy links, which is rare and usually harmless, and for which pages attract links, which informs what to write.
What goes in the monthly note
One paragraph, plain words:
Search: clicks steady at around 900 a month, up 6 percent on the previous quarter. 41 pages indexed, no new exclusions. All page groups Good on Core Web Vitals. No security issues. One 404 found for an old campaign page still linked from Facebook; redirected to the services page. Top new query this month: "emergency [service] [town]", which the [service] page is ranking for at position 8; worth a short paragraph on that page about emergency availability if you offer it.
The owner reads it in a minute, knows the site is being watched, and gets one suggestion they can act on or ignore.
What this is not
It is not SEO work. Content strategy, keyword research, link building and page-by-page optimisation are a different engagement with different goals. The monthly check keeps the technical foundation sound and notices when something changes, so that the SEO work, if and when it happens, is built on a site Google can see. It also catches the two or three things a year that would otherwise silently cost a business its rankings: a noindex left on after a change, a hack, a cache setting that broke the speed.
Doing it yourself
If you maintain your own site, the seven steps above take fifteen minutes once you know where to look, and steps 2, 4 and 6 are the ones that catch outages. Put it in the calendar for the first Monday of the month. If you would rather it were done for you and written up in a sentence you can read, that is one of the lines on our care plan.