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Google Search Console is a powerful tool for every SEO webmaster and a digital marketer.
Google Search Console is a free service provided by Google, to manage the search functionality of your website. Google Search Console is a collection of reports and tools that will help you to rectify your errors. It also strategizes and optimizes your ranking in search engines.
This is a real powerful tool for improving your SEO. Google ranks most of your pages for a number of search items. There are many other terms apart from keywords that attract attention from all search engines.
Google Search Console identifies all hidden keywords and can optimize your connect with them. It is a seven step process that is easy to implement, which will help you to develop strategy that will bring you huge number of additional visitors, each month.
Google algorithm ranks your each page for relevant terms to the content. You can access the conclusions through the Google Search Console, which is for absolutely free. You should begin the process to connect your site to your account, if you have not already done so.
Get the big and the little picture first
When you arrive at the overview screen, you have to click on the performance tab in the left column. You can see an overview of the performance of your site. This overview includes-
- Total number of clicks on your site.
- Total impressions made.
- The rate of average Click through
- The average position of your website, based on its highest position, whenever your site appeared in search.
The tabs of pages, queries, devices, countries, and search appearances help you to analyze the data points such as, clicks, CTR, position and impressions, in many ways. The overview of the tabs shows-
- Queries- all search terms of your ranking.
- Pages- The list of pages on your website.
- Countries- Geographic locations of origin of visitors on your site.
- Device- The devices used by people to interact with your website, mobile, desktop or tablet.
- Search Appearance- Inclusion of Accelerated Mobile Platforms and Snippets.
Now you should know as to how to evaluate this data. It will require spread sheets, custom formatting and some color coding.
Export the Page Keywords to the Google Sheets
You need to review the analytics of every page individually, to understand the keywords your contents are searching for. You select the pages tab and export the idea to Google Sheets, to have the aggregate overview of appearance of each page in the search results.
You can now identify the pages that have the biggest impact on traffic, by using these sort features in Google Sheets:
- You highlight Column A to E.
- You now click “data” in the Menu
- You select now “sort the range”.
- Click “data has header row”.
- You now select “Impressions”
- Now you choose” Z to A”
- Finally click “Sort”.
See the Screenshot to follow all the steps:-
You will now be able to see the individual URLs of your website, which are ranked by the number of impressions, high to low. The pages on the top are the strongest pages, capable of bringing more traffic to your site, if you optimize them properly.
You select you top 20 pages by impressions.
Now, download the Keywords
You now have to analyze all the keywords of all 20 pages, you have selected.
You have to go back to the Google Search Console for collection of the data-
- You click the “new button” and select “page”.
- Then you paste the first URL into the light box and click “apply”.
- You select “queries” from the table menu and click “export to Google Sheets”.
You sort the queries by impressions, in your exported Google Sheet. Repeat these steps for each of the 20 URLs. There will be now 21 tabs on your master Google Sheet.
Apply now conditional formatting
You can use conditional formatting, which is a set of rules, to analyze data on a spreadsheet. It also helps you to identify keywords; you would like to focus on to increase traffic.
You can use the following conditions-
- You highlight rows with average position of 10 or lower, in green.
- You highlight rows with average position between 11 to 20, in yellow.
- You highlight rows with average position from 21 and higher, in red.
You can apply conditional formatting to a single cell or in a column.
(Image: © Contentmarketinginstitute)
Now you have to analyze the results
Your spreadsheet now displays with different colors, your keywords and content opportunities. Your color scheme is a traffic signal approach scheme. Give preference to the green ones first, followed by the yellow and finally by the red.
Never hurry while reviewing analysis to look for effectiveness of your keywords you are focusing on. Review your targeted keywords, surprising keywords, patterns that are the high impressions but low CTR etc.
This is how you might use the information-
- If you find a phrase is ranking on the first and has a high number of impression but low CTR, you have to optimize the Meta Data to attract more clicks.
- If you find a phrase in position 21, or higher, having a high number of impressions but a low CTR, you have to increase the density of keywords in the existing content.
Update your SEO plans and content
It is now the time for you to update your metadata and the existing contents, to incorporate the high ranking terms you have already identified. You can check the process in several renowned resources.
You now review the SEO impact of your updates
It is a continuous process of improving metadata and updating old contents for you. You have to review the impact of your post analysis changes. It is best if you do it two weeks after you update a metadata description and three months after you change an existing content.
See the tab-
You can now either analyze the data in Search Console or export your data to Google Sheet. If you are seeing positives in increase in position, CTR, number of impressions, you are making changes for positive impact. No changes mean you have to reassess your metadata or make changes to your contents.
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