You may have heard the phrase “we found you on Google”, but have you ever wondered what they searched to find your website?
You can find out with Google Search Console: a free marketing tool that helps SEOs and webmasters understand how their website performs in the search results.
Here at Squarebird, good data keeps things moving smoothly, and Google Search Console offers some of the best around. In this article we will explore what Google Search Console is, the data you can get from the platform, and how you can incorporate the insights you can gain into your ongoing marketing plan to improve and optimise your content.
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What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is an analytics platform which measures the number of times a website appears on the organic search results. It allows businesses to analyse this data, highlight errors to improve the website’s performance, and communicate with Google about website updates and new content.
Google Analytics.
This tool is a great a complement to Google Analytics, and can give you detailed data about your organic performance, enabling you to understand how users are finding your website through Google Search.
Read our guide to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) >
Third-Party Tools.
Compared to tools like SEMrush or SErankings, Google Search Console offers us, as marketers, impartial and accurate data for our website. Third party tools often work off averages and estimated click through rates to produce their data which isn’t as accurate.
Benchmarking Against Competitors.
Google Search Console data is only available after you have proved you own a website, meaning if you are wanting to benchmark performance against competitors, you will need to use these third-party tools.
Metrics from Google Search Console
Google Search Console can give you insights into the number of impressions and clicks your website receives, along with your average position in search results.
- Impressions – This is a record of the number of times your website appeared in the search results. It can also be used interchangeably with searches: “My website had 10,000 impressions” could be phrased “My website appeared in 10,000 searches”.
- Clicks – The number of times your website was clicked in the search results.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – This measures the average percentage of impressions which resulted in a click. If you have a click through rate of 5%, it means for every 100 impressions, 5 will result in a click.
For most Google Searches, click through rates will often be from 1–3%. - Average Position – This metric tells us roughly where the website appears in the search results. As marketers, we want this to be as close to position 1 as possible, though it is near impossible to rank first for all keywords. As you can see from the accompanying screenshot, the average position for the website below in November 2023 was 38.1. This is measured across all keywords, including multiple high-ranking keywords with some in position 1.
These metrics combined will give you the performance of the website. As you can see from the accompanying screenshot, during the month of November, this website appeared in more than 232,000 searches and generated 1,710 clicks.
This graph, when looked at over a 12-month period, will allow a business to see seasonal peaks in engagement from users. Over time, this insight will empower you to optimise your content production to meet these peak performance periods.
Keyword Performance in Google Search Console
Google Search Console allows you to see the specific keywords (queries) users are typing into Google for your website to appear.
Breakdowns of the performance for each keyword are available, showing you impressions, clicks, and more. This will provide insight into your top performing keywords, and indicate whether this aligns to your overall strategy.
You may find that while you rank for a keyword in position 1, you may have very few clicks. This could suggest Google Ads are regularly present on this search and you might have to invest in pay per click (PPC) to obtain this traffic.
Monitoring keywords will also give you insight into how users are searching for things on Google. It is important to note differences in how a business would phrase the services they offer compared to how a user would phrase the service they need. For SEO, businesses and users need to be speaking the same language. To address this, you may have to pivot your messaging to better match the search intent of your users.
For example, Florist in Bristol may use the phrase “Wedding Flowers Bristol” which gets 100 searches per month, but another search term, “Bridal Bouquets Bristol”, gets 250 searches. In this case it would be beneficial to optimise the content to target the phrase with the higher search volume.
You can filter the data so you can see the phrases with the most clicks, impressions, or highest click through rate. Looking at the data in a variety of ways will help you understand how the different keywords perform.
Google Search Console: An Important Tool for Businesses
While data from Google Search Console is great, to make it truly useful you need to understand what the data is saying and act accordingly to improve your website content. This will help you measure the performance of your SEO activities and assess whether you are progressing towards your goals.
Understand Organic Visibility
Google Search Console will help you better understand your organic visibility, measure previous growth, and plan future operations. You will see the keywords which are generating the most traffic, along with ones which could be generating more. This enables you to spend your time and resources effectively on keywords in need of improvement rather than keywords which are already performing well.
Optimise Your Content
Using data from Google Search Console, you can see how users are searching for your products/services. This can help you understand how users are phrasing their queries. When needed, you can use this information to tweak page content to better reflect what users are searching for, increasing the relevancy of your content. Optimising your content should help improve the organic performance of the page and get more people clicking on your website who would find value in your offering.
Discovery New Opportunities
Auditing your search console every 6 months will help you discover new and growing keywords which could be beneficial to target with dedicated content. This will ensure your marketing plan is still up to date and in line with your objectives.
SEO Insights & Support from Squarebird
Many marketing teams have to wear many hats, from SEO, PPC, socials, emails, and more, but you don’t need to – we’re here to help. At Squarebird, we offer SEO support for businesses of all sizes and industries in the form of SEO-focused copywriting, optimisations, audits, and content planning.
Our team of SEO experts are here to help support your team in creating your organic marketing plan, getting your website seen by more people, and reaching your organic goals. Get in touch for more information on how we can help your SEO thrive!
Find out more about broader SEO tactics in our beginner’s guide to backlinks >
Reach customers in your area with our complete guide to local SEO for businesses >