Do I need a cookie banner?

Only if you store or access information on a visitor’s device beyond what is strictly necessary. A site with no analytics cookies, no advertising pixels and no third-party embeds needs no banner — and adding one anyway is theatre that costs conversions.

What is Google Search Console for?

Search Console shows how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your site: which queries you appear for, which pages are indexed and why others are not, crawl errors, and Core Web Vitals field data. It is the only source of your own query data and it is free.

How long until SEO results show?

Technical fixes such as indexation and crawl errors can show in Search Console within two to four weeks. Ranking movement realistically takes three to six months, and longer on a new domain. Impressions move before clicks, which is the earliest honest signal.

Process

What analytics should I use?

Something cookieless, unless you have a specific need GA4 uniquely meets. Cookieless analytics answers how many people arrived, from where, and how many converted — without a consent banner, and without putting visitor data into an ad network.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 153 words 3 sections

The questions worth answering

How many people arrived, and from where
Which pages they landed on and left from
How many completed the action that matters
How that splits by device

The trade-off with GA4

GA4 is powerful, free and requires consent in the UK and EU, which means a banner and reduced measurement. For most small businesses the extra capability answers questions nobody was asking, at the cost of the ones everybody was.

The metric most businesses under-track

Enquiries by source. Sessions, bounce rate and time on page are the metrics people watch and the ones that change nothing — where the enquiries came from is the number that decides where to spend next.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers it in about 6 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.