A lot of businesses use Google Analytics to view the traffic that visit their website. However, Google Search Console is an often overlooked resource that can show you what people are searching for and potential opportunities for content.
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
One of the tools provided by GSC includes the ability to see which web pages have been indexed by Google and the reasons why some might not have been;
You can also submit the sitemap of your website to GSC so that Google know what pages exists and can then go and attempt to index them.
However, the main reason that most people use GSC is to see which search terms are being used to find their website and which ones are being clicked on.
A key concept to remember is that when you search on Google, you are returned a list of websites that match your search term. That list might be 10 items long but you may only click on one website. For each website on the list, Google Search Console records that the website has appeared on the list (impressions) and that it has been visited (clicks).
If you look at the above screenshot, you can see that for some search terms, they are getting a lot of impressions but very few clicks. This gives you the opportunity to review your content to see if you can improve it and increase your click through rate.
How Do You Setup Google Search Console?
When you first visit the Google Search Console website, you have to tell it which website you want to start collecting the data for. There are two ways of doing this; “Domain” and “URL prefix”. It doesn’t matter which one you use as they collect the same data but for most people, “URL prefix” is the most suitable and easiest to setup.
Once you have entered your domain, Google Search Console then verifies that you have access to that domain. There are a number of different ways you can do the verification process;
The easiest verification method to use is Google Analytics as when you click it, GSC checks that it is setup and you have access to it and that is it. All of the other methods involve you uploading a file or changing your DNS settings. If you are unsure, then check with your web designer.
How to find content ideas in Google Search Console
Before we look at how you can use Google Search Console to find content ideas, we need to introduce one last concept – “Long-tail keywords“. Generally, these are specific, longer search terms which are longer than 3 words. They have lower search volumes (impressions) but higher conversion rates (clicks).
If you take the search term “web designer ascot”, what is the search intent here? What sort of web designer are they looking for? What platform do they want their website built on? What is their budget? You may find with this search term, you get lots of impressions but very few clicks.
However, if someone is searching for “eCommerce WordPress Web Designer in Ascot Budget £5000”, then you know exactly what they are looking for and providing that you have the content, they are more likely to click through to your website.
This is the key to using GSC to find content ideas. We will filter the information returned to only show search queries with more than 3 words. These are more likely to be questions which we can use to write content that is more likely to be clicked.
Looking at this list of queries of long-tail keywords extracted from Google Search Console, we can instantly see several ideas for blog posts; “What is a WordPress Care Plan” and “Questions to ask when redesigning a website”.
These both align with services that we offer and will help to improve the rankings of those services. If we were to create that content, we would also link back to the services and include a appropriate Call-To-Action (CTA),
To filter the list of queries, you need to use a Regular Expression. A Regular Expression is a string of characters that specifies a pattern of text to match, in this case strings that contains over 3 words.
Within Google Search Console, navigate to Performance and then click on “Add Filter” followed by “Query”.
From the Query dialog, select Custom (regex), enter (?:\b\w+\b(?:\s+|$)){4,} into the box titled “Enter regular expression (regex)” and click Apply.
This will then show you search terms with four words or more. If you find that there is too many results returned, you can increase the 4 within the regular expression to a larger number until you start to return more meaningful results.
Ideally you are looking for When / How / What / Why type questions that you can turn into blog posts. However, it can also be used to help you refine content to ensure that you are hitting the keywords that your potential clients are searching for.
We hope that you find this blog post useful and if you need any help or clarifications, please do not hesitate to contact us.
