Learn how to use Google Search Console Insights for web optimization methods

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Many tools can help you analyze your website audience data and improve your SEO strategy; In fact, you might be using a combination of these — and might even be paying to use them.

Enter Google Search Console Insights (GSCI), one of Google’s newer and most requested SEO improvement tools.

Read on to learn how to grow your brand with GSCI!

What are Search Console Insights?

Google Search Console Insights is a free platform that allows you to optimize your SEO results using data collected by Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

It gives an overview of website statistics and analyzes content performance from a technical point of view. It also allows you to pinpoint problems with your web pages and helps you customize the website to meet your users’ needs.

It’s a useful tool that web content creators, marketers, and SEO specialists need — and love.

Google Search Console Insights helps businesses and website owners on their search engine optimization journey. It is a guide to improving metrics such as

• keyword positions
• Average page view duration
• content quality
• Usability of the website

If you’re new to this topic and want more details to better understand the basics, check out this Google Search Console guide.

How do I get started with Search Console?

First, login to Google’s Search Console, then add and verify site ownership! It’s easy, but it takes a few steps:

1. log in with your Google Analytics account in Google Search Console so that they are synchronized. (As mentioned, GSCI pulls site performance data from both).
2. click Add a property.
3. Choose a domain or URL (preferably a domain).
4. Confirm You have this property, whether domain or URL, with your DNS provider. However, the easiest way to verify your property (the URL option) is to use your Google Analytics account.

How do you access Search Console Insights?

1. In Search Console, click the Overview tab and select Search Console Insights at the top of this page. In the Google app for iOS, click your profile picture and select Search Console Insights from the account menu.
2. Access via Google search in the search results.

Once you have access to this tool, you’ll need to check occasionally to make sure everything is running smoothly — once a month or whenever you post new content. If GSCI detects unusual activity on your website, you will receive an email notification.

How do I turn GSCI data into SEO solutions?

Now let’s move on to how you can use the data collected by GSCI to optimize your website’s organic ranking in search engines.

Rather than forcing you to your own conclusions by looking at simple charts and graphs from the analytics, GSCI automatically answers key questions you’ve probably been asking yourself about your site, including the five below.

1. What is your top performing content?

The Your Most Popular Content report shows the best pages by performance. Based on this data, you can prioritize work on the pages. You can find out what type of content is getting the most attention and what is trending.

GSC uses three badges to help you identify relevant information for your content:

• The top 5 results show what content ranks in the top 5 positions on average in organic search.
• Trending x% compares the last 28 days of your content with the performance of the content before that period.
• A high average duration highlights long-duration content compared to the rest of the site’s content.

2. How is your new content performing?

Google Search Console Insights is also helpful in analyzing your new pages. Check which recently published content is getting impressions quickly in Google search results. Use the Your New Content report. It shows which new pages were accessed for the first time within the last 28 days, sorted from most recent to least recent.

If there were tests or strategies that worked well, you can extrapolate from the results. Now that we know which pages Google likes, we can make hypotheses and strategize to keep serving similar content.

3. How are people discovering your content on 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 top three traffic sources, e.g. E.g. organic search, paid search, direct, social and referrals.

But to get the most detailed information, you still need to check Google Search Console, where in the Performance report you can open the chart to show you the metrics for impressions, click-through rate, and the dimensions for search queries and even country.

You can go through the available filters to check your page’s performance in a specific area.

For example, you can determine where your traffic is coming from by typing a search type filter. If you want to know which pages are bringing traffic from image search results, select “Image” when browsing the filters. From the graph that appears, you can see the searches, pages, and countries that bring the most traffic for that particular search.

4. What are people searching for on Google before visiting your content?

Here you have access to the section that shows the top 50 searches that bring people to your website from the Google search engine. The queries would be ranked by how many times they were clicked on in a Google SERP.

They are ranked under each search query, and by default the list shows the “Most Searched Searches”. You can also switch the list to Most Trending Queries to see which searches have generated the most clicks in the current 28 days compared to the previous 28 days.

5. Which article directs users to your website and content?

The GSCI has a reporting section called Referring Links from Other Sites that shows you how many listings to a specific web page a specific referring page has generated. There you can see which of the websites linking to yours are most relevant to your users. You can then decide whether to continue publishing articles on that referring site or to promote the site the traffic is coming from.

Additionally, knowing which links are performing 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 site has improved since using this tool. Consistent pursuit of growth is how you can sustain it, so think of the following:

• Confirm that Google associates your content with your target keyword. The SE Ranking Keywords tool can help you choose the best keywords for your niche and optimize your content with those keywords. You can also use this keyword suggestion tool to figure out which new pages to create.
• Give priority to important websites. Review which ones are performing best in terms of organic search growth and analyze which efforts yield the best SEO results.
• Pay attention to how much time visitors spend on your website (average page view duration metric). If this metric is too low, check the relevance of your content and the structure of your site. (Note that the data for Google Search Console Insights is different than that from Google Analytics. GSCI combines data like page views and average time on page from Google Analytics with search metrics like clicks and average position. Essentially, you’re plotting activity on what what happens in Google’s search bar, and the other thing that happens on your website.)

* * *

Ultimately, your audience decides whether your content and website strategy is working. Google Search Console Insights helps you understand what your audience likes and dislikes about your website. It’s a great tool for marketers novices and experts alike.

GSCI can help you improve your content strategy, increase your visibility on the Google search engine, and grow your audience.

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