Google Search Console: Marketing’s Secret Weapon

What if I told you there was a tool available that:

• Helps with your SEO results 
• Stores 16 months of your Google search engine performance.
•  Is free of charge.
•  Alert you to any errors you may have that are negatively impacting your SEO results.

Google Search Console checks all those boxes! In this article, I will be focusing on the Performance section. I will cover the other sections in future articles. Google Search Console can be found at https://search.google.com/search-console.

Performance

The performance section is a treasure trove of information if you know what you are looking for. At the top of this section, there are four main areas you can view for your website performance:

• Clicks: How many organic clicks you are getting to your site from Google.
• Total Impressions: How many times a user saw a link to your site from Google.
• Average Click Thru Rate (CTR): This represents the number of clicks to your site over your total impressions.
• Average position: This is one of my favorite metrics. This represents the average position you show up for all search terms that you appeared in.

You can view this data historically for up to 16 months and easily compare time frames by adjusting the filters on this page. 

Queries Tab

At the bottom of the performance tab, there is a table with five different tabs to look at. 

The first tab that you can dig into is the queries tab. The top 1,000 keywords will show up in the table under the graph with their individual clicks, impressions and positioning information.  

I find two solid uses for this tab. The first thing is to see what search terms are being clicked on. This lets me know what terms my natural search traffic is coming from, how I am ranking on those terms and if I should be reviewing these terms to find high performing keywords. 

Another thing I will look for is terms that my average position is below 10th, meaning off the first page, and has high impression volume. I will take these keywords and start creating blog posts or optimized landing pages for these terms to rank higher on. With the right strategy, I have had search terms go from 4th or 5th page to the 1st page in less than 4 weeks.

Pages Tab

The pages tab shows what landing pages search queries are returning. There can be some good insights gained from this section. Normally, your home page will be the number one page. Looking at pages that are generating a lot of impressions but you are ranking low on from an average position are pages that I always look to optimize. I will also look at terms where there aren’t a lot of impressions but I am ranking well to see if I can find some elements causing those pages to rank well and use them on other pages.

Countries Tab

The Countries tab is self-explanatory. However, there is one thing I look for. If I am a business that only operates in one country, I will filter down to those results only as the rest is just noise in my results.

Devices Tab

The Devices tab also doesn’t need much explanation. One thing to note on this tab is Google is moving everything to a mobile first two in terms of crawling and indexing your site. Make sure you are optimizing for all users to maximize your SEO efforts.

Search Appearance Tab

This tab can compare different ways that your search appears in google. For example, if you are using rich snippets or job listings, you can see specifically how these search types are performing.

Conclusion

Utilizing the tips above on the performance section of Search Console will help you identify SEO opportunities, gain valuable insights about where visitors are landing and have a strong understanding of where both your current and historical search engine rankings are at.

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Thank you for reading! I am Dave Schafer, an always learning entrepreneur, recovering accountant, aspiring marketer and amateur writer hoping to strengthen my writing skills. One of my large passions is all things digital marketing, an ever changing field that offers so much upside done right. I would love to hear your feedback on this article.