Using Search Console To Inform Your Organic SEO Strategy
When people think of creating an SEO strategy, they usually turn straight to a technical audit, potentially some local SEO and then quickly move to basic content strategy, usually informed and driven by Google Analytics and keyword scraping tools such as Google Keyword Planner. Often overlooked and underrated in this mix is Google Search Console, which in reality should form the backbone of your whole SEO strategy.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to monitor, measure, and troubleshoot how your website performs in organic search results. Google Analytics measures a websites traffic, conversions, demographics and interests of people who land on the website. Search Console measures and looks at how your site looks in search results for both brand and non-brand terms before people click through to a website. If you want to get more leads and revenue on your website, you need to get more traffic, and to get more traffic you need to get more impressions and visibility on key terms and themes in Google search. This is what search console is a goldmine for - monitoring, measuring and troubleshooting your sites visibility.
What can you measure in Google Search Console?
Google Search Console lets you measure your organic performance by query. What this means is you can measure the amount of impressions, clicks, and average position over time on a specific query. This allows you to get visibility on all of the technical and content SEO changes that you may be making on your site and the impact it has over time. Search Console also gives you coverage reports to let you know any issues that Google has when crawling and indexing your site.
Using Search Console to inform future content
Everyone wants to know what content to publish next in their content strategy. But outside of tools like Keyword Planner, Trends, and the like, Search Console can give you significant hints on what you should publish next.
Because you can see what queries get the most impressions and clicks inside the platform, this is a great way to see which content has high search volume and engagement rates. If you see a certain term or topic is performing strongly inside Search Console, publish more content around this theme to become more of an authority on the matter. Continuing to do this will allow you to see where to focus your future efforts in your content SEO efforts.
Summary
Being at the top of the organic search result is still as important as it ever has been. Getting there however, is becoming increasingly harder. Developing an organic SEO strategy is usually informed by a number of tools but Google Search Console is often overlooked and/or undervalued. Keeping this tool at the forefront of your organic strategy and measurement will allow you to grow your business much more effectively and efficiently than if you leave it on the sidelines.
