Google Search Console for contractors: the 5 reports worth checking

Search Console answers three questions a contractor actually has about the website: is Google showing my pages, for which searches, and is anything broken? It doesn't answer the fourth, the one that matters most: did any of those clicks turn into paid jobs? That part lives in your own records. This guide covers the five reports worth a monthly look, a way to sort your searches into buckets that mean something for a trade business, and how to join it all to booked jobs in about 20 minutes a month.

It's part of the SEO hub. If you haven't set up the rest of your measuring yet (tracking number, tagged profile link, form source), start with the first two weeks of the contractor SEO plan.

Set it up once

Choose a Domain property. Search Console offers two property types. A URL-prefix property includes only addresses that start with exactly what you typed, protocol included. A Domain property includes all subdomains (www, m and so on) and all protocols, and must be verified with a DNS record.¹ For a contractor whose site has lived at both www and non-www, or moved from http to https, the Domain property avoids the classic mistake of watching the wrong version of the site for a year.

The DNS record goes in at your domain registrar (where you pay for the domain name). If a web designer controls that account, ask them to add the record and then add you as an owner. Don't let the only owner of your Search Console be a vendor.

Submit your sitemap. In the Sitemaps report, enter your sitemap's address. You're telling Google where the file is; you can't upload it. Google lists three statuses: Success, Has errors, and Couldn't fetch.⁴ Submission doesn't guarantee that every listed page gets crawled or indexed.⁴

Write down your page groups. This is the step nobody does and everybody needs. List which pages are service pages, area pages, emergency pages and articles. Monthly numbers by group are readable; numbers by single page mostly aren't.

The 5 reports worth checking

1. Performance: clicks, impressions, queries, pages

The main report. Google defines its four numbers plainly: clicks are the times someone clicked your site from Search results; impressions are how many times your site appeared; CTR is clicks divided by impressions; average position is the average position of your topmost result.⁵ You can break them down by queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance and dates, and switch the search type between web, image, video and news.⁵

Things contractors should know about this report:

• It keeps 16 months. That's enough for one full year-over-year comparison, which is exactly what seasonal trades need.⁶ Export a monthly snapshot if you want more.
• Some queries are hidden. Google omits some queries to protect user privacy; those anonymized queries still count in the chart totals unless you apply a query filter.³
• There's a branded filter. It splits queries by whether they contain your brand name. It isn't available for sites with few impressions, and Google notes some queries may be misclassified.³
• AI Overviews are already in here. Google says sites appearing in AI features are counted in the Performance report under the Web search type.⁷ A separate generative AI performance report shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and as of August 31, 2026 it's rolled out to all sites, though it may not appear for sites with too few impressions in those features.⁸

2. Page indexing: which pages Google kept

This report shows how many of your URLs Google crawled and indexed, and why the rest weren't.² The reasons you'll see most on contractor sites:

Don't chase 100%. Google says plainly that you shouldn't expect every URL to be indexed, only the canonical pages.² What you want is every service page and every real area page indexed. If a batch of near-identical city pages shows up as duplicates or "crawled, not indexed," Google is telling you something.

3. URL Inspection: one page, in detail

Paste one address into the search bar at the top. You'll see Google's indexed version of that page, which may be older than the live page.⁹ Test live URL fetches the page right now to check for problems. Request indexing asks Google to crawl it; Google says that doesn't guarantee indexing, and there's a daily limit, so for many pages a sitemap is the better route.⁹

Use it after you publish or rewrite an important page, such as a new water heater page before the season, not as a daily habit.

4. Sitemaps: is Google reading your list?

Once set up, this needs a glance a month: status still Success, discovered URL count roughly matching the number of pages you have. A sudden drop usually means a site update broke the sitemap. Couldn't fetch means Google can't reach the file at all.⁴

5. Core Web Vitals: is the site fast for real visitors?

This report uses real-user data from the Chrome UX Report and groups similar pages together.¹⁰ A page group is Good when the largest content loads in 2.5 seconds or less, it responds to taps in 200 milliseconds or less, and layout shift stays at 0.1 or less.¹⁰ Check the mobile tab first: that's where emergency searchers are. Large photo galleries and heavy page builders are the usual culprits on contractor sites.

Four query buckets for a trade business

A list of 400 queries is unreadable. Four buckets aren't. Use the query filter ("queries containing") and the branded filter to sort them.

The brand bucket is the one owners misread most. A jump in brand searches is great news, but it's mostly the result of other marketing (trucks, mailers, referrals), not of SEO work. Judge SEO on the other three buckets.

Join it to booked jobs: the 20-minute monthly review

Search Console stops at the click. Here's the routine that closes the gap.

1. 1

   Minutes 1 to 5: Performance by page group

   Last full month, compared with the same month last year. Note clicks and impressions for each page group, and the four query buckets.

2. 2

   Minutes 6 to 10: indexing, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals

   Any important page dropped from the index? Sitemap still Success? Any page group fallen out of Good on mobile?

3. 3

   Minutes 11 to 15: booked jobs with an organic source

   From your field service software: calls on the organic tracking number, form leads with an organic or Business Profile source, and the jobs and completed revenue that carry those sources.

4. 4

   Minutes 16 to 20: write one decision

   One page group to improve, merge or leave alone next month. Write it down with the numbers next to it, so next month's review starts from it.

If you give each important page group its own tracking number, this number is exact for calls. For forms, it depends on your form passing its source onto the lead. Where a month has no organic jobs at all, record no data rather than zero, and check the tracking before concluding the pages failed. Clean lead source attribution is what makes the join possible.

app.tradeswork.app · Reports with metric definitions

In TradesWork, the reports can be filtered by campaign and marketing channel, and every value opens the rows behind it, which is the second half of this join. See Reports and dashboards for how the metric definitions work.

How to measure it from your jobs

Where to go next

The trade guides apply this to specific page lists: HVAC SEO maps pages to job types and ZIPs, and roofing SEO adds the long sales cycle. If you also want to see what visitors do on the site after the click, the GA4 guide in the attribution section covers calls, forms and bookings as key events. And if an agency or a platform such as TradesForce reports your rankings, ask them to group pages the same way you do here, so their monthly report and your Search Console review describe the same thing.