Search Console for an online store: which reports to check and what to do with them

Google Search Console is free, comes straight from Google and is the only tool that tells you how the search engine sees your store: which pages it has indexed, which searches you appear for and what problems it finds. Even so, many stores have it set up and only glance at the clicks chart now and then.

This is a practical tour of the reports that matter for a store and of what usually shows up in them when the store runs on PrestaShop.

First of all: the property set up properly

If you can, set up a Domain property (verified by DNS), which groups all the variants: with and without www, http and https, subdomains. A URL-prefix property only sees one of them, and after a migration it is easy to end up looking at the wrong version.

Also check who has access. Former agencies, employees who have left or a developer from years ago may still be listed as owners. Review it as you would review back office employees.

Performance: which searches find you

This is the best-known report: clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, with data for the last sixteen months. The useful part is in the filters:

• By page: which product pages and categories get impressions. A product page with lots of impressions and a very low CTR usually has an unappealing title or meta description.
• By query: which words people use to find you. Separate brand searches (your name) from generic ones; if almost all traffic is branded, the catalogue’s SEO is barely doing any work.
• By country and device: if you sell abroad, check that each language gets traffic from the right country; if mobile CTR is much worse than desktop, look at how your result and your product page appear on a phone.
• Compare periods: after a change (a migration, a new theme, a rewrite of product pages), compare the same period before and after.

Average position is an average across all impressions and is easily misleading. Use it for trends on a specific page or query, not as an overall score for the store.

Page indexing: the report that says most about a store

It shows how many URLs Google has indexed and, above all, why it is not indexing the rest. On a PrestaShop store the reasons repeat themselves:

URL Inspection

Paste the URL of a product page and it tells you whether it is indexed, which canonical Google has chosen, whether it is eligible for rich results and when it was crawled. With “Test live URL” you see the page as Googlebot renders it, useful when a module loads content via JavaScript or when you suspect the theme hides text on mobile.

If Google has chosen a different canonical from yours, something does not add up: the same product page reachable through several paths, internal links to the wrong version or content almost identical to another page.

Sitemaps

Submit the store’s sitemap and check that it is read without errors and that the number of submitted URLs is similar to the number of active products and categories. In PrestaShop the sitemap is normally generated by the Google Sitemap module; check that it is regenerated by a scheduled task and that it does not include disabled products or pages you have set to noindex. A sitemap with URLs that redirect or return 404 undermines trust in the whole file.

Merchant listings and Product snippets

If your store publishes product structured data, Search Console shows specific reports with errors and warnings: price without currency, missing availability, malformed ratings, missing shipping or returns information. Errors make the page ineligible for rich results; warnings do not, but they point to data you are missing.

Watch out for themes and modules that each publish their own markup: it is common to see the same product page with two contradictory product blocks.

Core Web Vitals

It groups your URLs by LCP, INP and CLS using real data from Chrome users, separately for mobile and desktop. It does not give a score per page but per group of similar pages, and only if there is enough traffic. Use it to see trends and which template (product page, category, home page) is dragging the problem; the specific diagnosis is done afterwards with other tools.

What to check every month

1. Performance compared with the previous month and with the same month last year.
2. Indexing: if the exclusion reasons suddenly grow, something has changed (a module, a filter, an update).
3. New errors in product structured data.
4. Manual actions and Security issues: almost always empty, and best kept that way. A security warning usually arrives before a customer complaint does.
5. Links: which pages receive external links and whether any of them redirect or return an error.

A store kept up to date on version and modules produces fewer surprises in these reports: many error spikes appear right after installing an old module or changing theme without reviewing canonicals and markup.

How to solve it in PrestaShop

Reading the reports is half the job; the other half is fixing in the store what they point out. Rekire’s AI-powered technical SEO service takes care of that part on a monthly subscription: since we work on the technical side of your PrestaShop, we apply the changes ourselves in the code, the database and the configuration, with attention to indexing, cleaning up 404 errors, tags, heading structure, product pages and categories, and performance.