Search Console shows how your website performs in search, using data no analytics tool has: the actual queries people used. For a clinic it is the most useful free tool available, and most practices either have not set it up or have never opened it.
Setting it up
- Verify ownership of your domain, preferably at domain level so all subdomains and protocols are covered.
- Use a practice-owned account, not an agency account or a departing staff member address. This is the same ownership lesson as chapter two.
- Submit your sitemap.
- Do the equivalent in Bing webmaster tools, which practices routinely skip and which matters for Copilot per chapter five.
The performance report
Four metrics, and the value is in how you combine them:
- Impressions. How often you appeared.
- Clicks. How often someone came.
- Click-through rate. Clicks divided by impressions.
- Average position. Treat as a rough indicator only.
The powerful move is filtering by query and by page, then reading impressions against click-through rate. Three patterns tell you what to do:
- High impressions, low click-through. You are appearing but not being chosen. Usually a title and description problem, and the cheapest fix available.
- Low impressions on a term you should own. A relevance or content gap. Often a missing treatment or office page.
- Clicks on unexpected queries. Patients using different language than you do. Adopt their words.
What to look at for a clinic
- Queries containing treatment names, and whether the right page is receiving them.
- Queries containing your city or neighbourhood, and whether the correct office page is the one appearing.
- Practice name and clinician name queries. If a directory outranks you for your own clinician name, that is worth fixing.
- Question queries about process, cost, and insurance. These are the questions you can legitimately answer, and they are frequently unserved.
- Page-level performance for each office and treatment page.
The reports beyond performance
- Indexing. Confirms your important pages are actually indexed. A treatment page that is not indexed cannot rank, and this is the first thing to check when a page seems invisible.
- Sitemaps. Whether yours is being read.
- Core Web Vitals. Field data from real visitors, which is better evidence than a lab test, per chapter six.
- Mobile usability.
- Structured data reports. Whether your MedicalClinic and FAQ markup is valid, which matters for chapters five and six.
- Manual actions. Rarely populated, and important if it is.
How to avoid drowning in it
The tool offers far more than you need. A sustainable routine:
- Monthly: performance for the last three months, filtered to your treatment and location queries. Note the three biggest opportunities and act on one.
- Quarterly: indexing status of important pages, structured data validity, and Core Web Vitals.
- After any site change: indexing and structured data.
- Ignore day-to-day fluctuation and average position as a headline.
Two cautions
First, data is filtered and thresholded, so low-volume queries may not appear and totals will not reconcile exactly with analytics. That is expected.
Second, treat query data as commercially sensitive but not as patient data. It is aggregated and anonymised, and you should not attempt to connect it to individuals. In a psychiatric practice, resist any tooling that promises to identify individual visitors, both for privacy reasons and because it is a poor basis for decisions.
Grid rank tracking is next, and it is the most misread tool in the category.