This post explains the specific things an experienced consultant looks for in Search Console during the first week of an engagement, and why each one matters. If you run a business website in India and have never opened Search Console, it is worth reading this with your own account open in another tab.

The Pages Report: What Google Has Actually Indexed

The first stop is the Pages report, which shows how many of the site's URLs are indexed and, more importantly, why the others are not. Many Indian business websites have far more URLs than their owners realise. Old campaign pages, tag archives, filtered product listings, staging copies and parameter URLs from tracking links all appear here, and a large pile of them in the excluded list is a sign that search engines are spending attention on pages that do not matter.

An expert reads the reasons one by one. “Crawled, currently not indexed” on important service pages usually means Google visited and decided the page was not useful enough, which points to thin or duplicated content. “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” often reveals near-identical location or product pages. “Excluded by noindex tag” on a page that should rank is a straightforward technical mistake, often left behind after a redesign. “Page with redirect” in large numbers can mean internal links still point to old URLs. Each pattern leads to a different fix, and none of them is visible from the homepage.

The goal at this stage is not to fix everything at once. It is to understand the shape of the site: how many pages Google considers worth indexing, which important pages are missing, and what is wasting crawl attention.

The Performance Report: Queries, Pages and the Ones Almost Ranking

The Performance report shows the searches that brought impressions and clicks, the pages that appeared, and the average position. An experienced consultant does not just sort by clicks. They look for three things.

The first is mismatch between query and page. If searches for a specific service land on the homepage or a blog post rather than the service page, the service page is probably too weak or poorly linked. The second is pages sitting in positions eight to twenty for valuable searches. These are rankings the site almost has, and modest improvements to the content, title and internal links can move them onto page one far faster than building something new. The third is click-through rate. A page ranking in the top five with very few clicks usually has a title and description that do not match what searchers want, which is one of the cheapest problems in SEO to fix.

Comparing date ranges also matters. A sudden drop around a specific date often lines up with a site change, a migration or a Google update, and knowing which one is essential before deciding what to do. The earlier article on the first ninety days of SEO for an Indian business describes how these findings turn into an early plan.

Experience, Links and Manual Actions: The Risk Check

The final part of the first review is a check for anything that could undermine the rest of the work. The Core Web Vitals and page experience reports show whether real visitors, most of them on mid-range Android phones in India, are getting a slow or unstable experience. The Links report shows which sites link to the business and which internal pages receive the most internal links, often revealing that the most important service pages are barely linked from anywhere on the site. The Manual Actions and Security Issues sections confirm whether Google has taken action against the site, which happens more often than people expect after a past provider bought low-quality links.

Each of these findings feeds directly into priorities. A site with a manual action needs that resolved before anything else. A site with weak internal linking to its service pages has a quick, free improvement available. A site that is painfully slow on mobile needs technical work before content investment will pay off. This is why the best specialists resist promising a fixed list of deliverables before they have looked. The right work depends on what the data shows, and two businesses in the same industry can need very different things.

If you are comparing providers, a good test is to give each one read-only access to Search Console and ask what they see. A strong consultant will come back with specific observations about your own pages and queries. A weak one will send a generic proposal that could apply to any website. For a fuller checklist on judging proposals, see how to evaluate an SEO proposal line by line, and for what to do before handing over access, how to choose an SEO expert without guesswork is a useful companion.

Search Console will not tell you everything, but it tells you what is true, and every good SEO plan starts from the truth about the site as it stands today.

One more habit separates careful specialists from hurried ones: they write down what they found before changing anything. A short baseline note listing indexed pages, the top queries by clicks, the pages sitting just outside page one and any warnings in the experience reports gives everyone a fixed point to measure progress against. Three months later, that note is what shows whether the work actually moved the numbers that matter to the business, rather than a feeling that things have improved. If you would like an independent first read of your own Search Console data, you can get in touch through the SEO Expert India contact page with a short note about your website and goals.

This article sets out a practical checklist you can use whether you are moving from an agency to a freelancer, from a freelancer to an in-house hire, or between two agencies.

What you should receive before the old engagement ends

The most important rule is to request materials while the existing contract is still active. Once the relationship ends, cooperation tends to drop, and some items become hard to recover.

Account access in your name. Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, Google Tag Manager, your hosting control panel and your content management system should all be owned by your business, with providers added as users. If any of these were created under the provider's email, ask for ownership to be transferred now. This is the single most common problem in handovers, and it is entirely avoidable.

A change log. Ask for a list of the pages that were edited, created, merged or redirected, with dates. Even a simple spreadsheet is valuable. Without it, your next provider cannot tell whether a ranking drop is related to a recent change or to something outside the website.

The content inventory. Request a list of every article, landing page and guest post produced during the engagement, with the target keyword for each. This helps avoid writing the same topic twice and shows which pieces are still worth updating.

The link record. Ask for every link that was built or earned, the page it points to and the anchor text used. You need this to check quality, to spot anything risky, and to avoid paying again for links that already exist.

Keyword and reporting history. Export rank tracking data and past monthly reports. Trends over many months are far more useful than a single snapshot.

Content and design files. If the provider wrote content in their own documents or designed images and banners, request the source files. You paid for them, and having the originals makes later updates far quicker than rebuilding from the published pages.

Open tasks and known issues. Every engagement has unfinished work. Ask for a short list of what was planned next, which technical issues were known but not yet fixed, and any conversations with developers or publishers that are still in progress. This list often turns into the incoming provider's first month of work.

The Deep Bhardwaj network has a detailed guide on what you should receive when you change agencies in India, which is worth keeping as a reference alongside this list.

How the next SEO expert in India should take over

The incoming provider has a different job in the first few weeks. They should be listening and checking before they change anything significant.

Week one: verify access and tracking. The new consultant should confirm they can see Search Console, analytics and the website back end, and check that conversion tracking still works. Forms, phone clicks and chat buttons should be recorded properly. If tracking is broken, every later report will be misleading.

Weeks two and three: audit and compare. A fresh technical and content audit, compared with the old provider's records, shows what was done well and what needs attention. It is common to find redirect chains from earlier site changes, pages accidentally set to noindex, or thin service pages that were never improved. These findings should be shared with you in plain language, ranked by impact.

Week four: agree the plan. Only after the audit should the new SEO consultant in India propose a plan for the next quarter. A good plan explains what will continue from the previous engagement, what will stop, and what is new. Avoid providers who want to rebuild everything immediately; continuity often protects rankings that took a long time to earn.

The incoming provider should also introduce themselves to anyone else who touches the website, such as your developer, your content writer or your paid advertising team. Search work overlaps with all of these roles, and a short introduction prevents conflicting changes, duplicated effort and confusion about who approves what.

It also helps to agree on what the new provider will not touch for the first month. Leaving stable, well-ranking pages alone while the audit is completed reduces risk and makes it easier to see the effect of each change later.

Mistakes that cost businesses rankings during a switch

A few problems appear repeatedly when companies change providers, and most of them come from rushing.

Removing content or links in a hurry. Some businesses ask the old provider to take down everything they created. Deleting pages that rank, or removing guest posts that send relevant links, can cause a noticeable drop. Review each item first and keep anything that is useful and genuine.

Changing the website at the same time. A redesign, a platform migration and a provider change in the same month make it impossible to understand what caused any movement. Where possible, separate these events by several weeks, and make sure the incoming provider is involved in the redirect plan for any migration.

Losing the Google Business Profile. Local visibility depends heavily on the Business Profile. If it was managed under someone else's account, ownership must be secured before the old provider leaves, or months of reviews and photos can become difficult to manage.

Skipping the brief. The new provider needs to know your priority services, your best customers, your margins and your sales process. Spending an hour on a proper brief saves weeks of misdirected work. This list of ten questions to answer before you start a new SEO engagement makes a good starting template for that brief.

Judging too early. Search performance after a handover often stays flat for a few weeks while the new provider audits and plans. That is normal. Agree on the indicators you will review at thirty, sixty and ninety days so expectations are clear on both sides.

A provider change does not have to be a setback. With access secured, records collected and a calm first month, a switch can be the point where an SEO programme finally gains direction. Many businesses find that the discipline of a proper handover also improves their own internal records, which makes every later decision about content, links and budgets easier to justify.

If you are planning a switch and want an independent view of your website, your existing records and a realistic first-quarter plan, you can contact SEO Expert India and share your site address along with any reports you have from your current provider.