How to Use Google Search Console Insights for Your SEO Strategy
Many tools can help you to analyze your
website audience data and improve your SEO strategy; in fact, you may be using
a combination of them—and maybe even paying to use them.
Enter Google Search Console Insights (GSCI), one of the more
recent, and most asked about, SEO improvement tools by Google.
Keep reading to learn how you can grow your brand using GSCI!
What is Search Console Insights?
Google Search Console Insights is a free platform that helps you
optimize your SEO results using data collected from Google Search Console and
Google Analytics.
It gives an overview of website statistics and analyzes content
performance from a technical standpoint. It also allows you to pinpoint issues
with your webpages while helping you tailor the website to your users' needs.
It's a useful tool that Web content creators, marketers, and SEO specialists need—and tend to love.
Google Search Console Insights helps business and website owners
on their search engine optimization journey. It is a guide for improving
metrics, such as...
- Keyword
positions
- Average
page view duration
- Content
quality
- Website
usability
How do I get started on Search Console?
To get started, sign up for Google's Search Console, then add
and verify site ownership! It's simple, but it takes a few steps:
- Log in to Google Search Console
with your Google Analytics account so they sync. (As noted earlier, GSCI
retrieves the website's performance data from both).
- Click Add
a property.
- Choose a domain or URL
(preferably a domain).
- Confirm you own that property,
whether domain or URL, with your DNS provider. However, the easiest way to
verify your property (the URL option) is by using your Google Analytics
account.
How do you access Search Console Insights?
- Click
on the Overview tab in the Search Console and select Search Console
Insights at the top of that page. In the Google app for iOS, click your
profile picture and select Search Console Insights in the account's menu.
- Access
from Google Search in Search Results.
Once you have access to this tool, you will need to check in
occasionally to make sure everything is running smoothly—once a month, or
whenever you post new content. If GSCI notices any unusual activity on your
website, you will receive an email alert.
How do I turn GSCI data into SEO solutions?
Let's now move on to how to use the data GSCI collects to
optimize your website's organic ranking in search engines.
Instead of making you arrive at your own conclusions by looking
at plain charts and graphics from the analytics,
GSCI will automatically answer important questions you have probably been
asking yourself about your website, including the following five.
1. What are your best-performing pieces of content?
"Your most popular content" report shows the best
pages by performance. Based on that data, you can prioritize work on the pages.
You can find out what type of content garners the most attention and which ones
have been trending.
GSC uses three badges to help you identify relevant info for
your content:
- Top
5 Results shows which content's average organic search position is in the
Top 5 spots.
- Trending
x% compares your content's previous 28 days with how the content performed
before that period.
- High
average duration highlights high-duration content vs. the website's other
content.
2. How are your new pieces of content performing?
Google Search Console Insights is also helpful for analyzing
your new pages. Check which of the recently published content quickly receives
impressions in Google search results. Use "Your new content" report.
It shows which new pages received its first views within the last 28 days,
sorting from most to least recent.
If there
were tests or strategies that worked well, you can extrapolate from the
results. We now know which pages Google likes, and therefore we can build
hypotheses and develop strategies to keep delivering similar content.
3. How do people discover your content across the Web?
By knowing
where people are discovering your content, you can drastically change your
marketing game to focus on those traffic channels. To understand how people
land on your page, GSCI shows your three most popular traffic sources, such as
organic search, paid search, direct, social, and referral.
You can go
through the available filters to check the performance of your page in a
specific area.
For
example, you can determine where your traffic is coming from by entering a search
type filter. If you want to know what pages are bringing
traffic from image search results, select "Image" when browsing
through the filters. From the displayed chart, you'll be able to see the
queries, pages, and countries that are bringing in the most traffic for that
particular search.
4. What do people search for on Google before they visit your
content?
You have a
rank position under each query, and by default the list showcases the
"Most Searched Queries." You can also switch the list to the
"Most Trending Queries" to learn which search queries grew the most
in terms of clicks in the current vs. previous 28 days.
5. Which article refers users to your website and content?
The GSCI
has a report section called "Referring links from other websites"
that shows you how many entries to a certain webpage a specific referring page
generated. There, you can see which of the websites linking to yours are the
most relevant to your users. You can then decide whether you should still post
articles on that referring site or promote the page from which the traffic is
coming from.
Moreover,
knowing which links work well can help inform your future link-building
strategy.
What Else Should I Consider With GSCI?
Track the
data over time to see how your website has improved since using this tool.
Consistent tracking of growth is how you can sustain it, so keep the following
in mind:
- Confirm
that Google is associating your content to your target keyword. The SE Ranking
keyword tool can help you choose the best keywords for
your niche and optimize your content with those keywords. You can also
find out what new pages you should create by using this keyword suggestion
tool.
- Give
priority to the important webpages. Check which ones are performing the
best in terms of search organic growth, and analyze which efforts bring
the best SEO results.
- Pay attention to how much time visitors spend on your website (average pageview duration metric). If this metric is too low, check your content relevancy and website structure. (Keep in mind that the data for Google Search Console Insights is different from that of Google Analytics. GSCI combines data such as pageviews and average time on page from Google Analytics with Search metrics such as clicks and average position. Basically, one represents the activity happening on Google's search bar, and
Ultimately,
it's your audience that decides whether your content and website strategy work.
Google Search Console Insights helps you understand what your audience likes
and doesn't like on your website. It's a great tool for marketing beginners and
experts alike.
GSCI can
help you improve your content strategy, increase your visibility in Google's
search engine, and grow your audience.
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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or email me at john@x2media.us
Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!
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