SEO & Référencement Noindex # Why do we need access to your Google Search Console? 5 min de lecture When working on your site — whether it's for an audit, a redesign, or SEO optimization — you are often asked for access to your **Google Search Console**. This request may seem technical or abstract. Here’s why it is concretely useful, and how to grant access in 2 minutes. ## What is Google Search Console? Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free tool provided by Google. It gives you access to data that only Google has about your site: how it is crawled, indexed, and displayed in search results. This is not Google Analytics. Analytics tells you **what visitors do on your site** once they arrive. Search Console tells you **what Google sees of your site** — even before the visitor clicks. ## What we can do with this access ### See which pages Google indexes (and which it ignores) Google does not necessarily visit all your pages. Some may be excluded from the index — because they have a `noindex` tag, because the site structure makes them inaccessible, or because they have been blocked in the `robots.txt` file. Without Search Console, we wouldn’t know. With it, we can see exactly which pages are indexed, which are excluded, and for what reason. ### Identify crawl errors If Google encounters pages that cannot be found (404 error), broken redirects, or loading issues, Search Console lists them. These errors can harm your SEO without you being aware of it. ### Know which keywords you appear for Search Console displays the exact queries that users typed before seeing your site on Google — even if they didn’t click. It’s a goldmine of information to understand your actual visibility and identify improvement opportunities. ### Measure Core Web Vitals Google includes a report on **Core Web Vitals** in Search Console — the performance indicators that directly influence your ranking (speed, visual stability, responsiveness). It’s the most reliable source to know if your site meets or fails these criteria according to Google itself, based on real-world data. ### Check mobile compatibility The mobile usability report indicates if certain pages have issues on smartphones: text too small, clickable elements too close, content wider than the screen. Problems that can lower your ranking, as Google uses the mobile version of your site as the reference for indexing. ### Submit the sitemap and request reindexing After a redesign or the publication of new pages, we can submit your XML sitemap to Google to speed up the acknowledgment of changes. We can also manually request the reindexing of a specific page — useful when an SEO correction needs to be recognized quickly. ### Detect manual penalties If Google has applied a manual penalty on your site (due to practices not compliant with its guidelines), it is only visible in Search Console. Without access, we cannot know if this is the reason for a drop in traffic. ## What we cannot do without this access Without Search Console, we work partly in the dark. We can analyze your site from the outside, but we do not see what Google sees from the inside. Concretely, this means: - We cannot confirm which pages are actually indexed. - We do not see the crawl errors reported by Google. - We do not have access to actual click and impression data from Google. - We cannot submit your sitemap or request reindexing. - We cannot verify your Core Web Vitals based on Google’s real-world data. The audit remains possible, but it is less precise and less complete. ## How to grant us access? If you already have a Search Console account set up for your site, here’s how to add Mermio as a user: 1. Log in to [search.google.com/search-console](https://search.google.com/search-console) with your Google account. 2. Select your property (your site) from the dropdown menu at the top left. 3. In the left menu, click on **Settings** (gear icon at the bottom). 4. Click on **Users and permissions**. 5. Click on **Add user**, enter our email address (provided by your Mermio contact), and choose the **Delegated Owner** or **Full User** level. 6. Confirm. We receive an invitation and can access the data immediately. If your site is not yet set up in Search Console, we can help you do it — it’s an important step regardless of our collaboration. --- Did this article answer your question? Is there something still unclear, or would you like to see a topic addressed in this knowledge base? Let us know via the button below. 👇 [Contact us](http://www.mermio.ch/en/contact)