5 Ways Google Search Console Can Help Your SEO Strategy

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is Jon Jantz and no guests today. I'm doing another solo show. I'm kind of on a rant here about new SEO. SEO is not dead. The old playbook is dead. SEO is still a very, very valid channel. We just have to think about it completely differently. So in this segment of this series on the new SEO, I want to talk about a tool. And I know this is going to, for some people, this is going to be hard and dry and boring. But trust me, I'll first off try to make it not boring. But also, secondly, this is important. This is something that you need to pay attention to because one of the challenges, frankly, in SEO is a lot of the reporting that you get or that agencies give is it doesn't tell you much.

0:58It maybe tells you rankings or some movement in keywords, but it doesn't really tell you what to do. And the Google Search Console is actually the tool that tells you what to do if you know how to mine it, how to actually improve intent, how to improve click through, the things that are actually going to lead to conversion. And let's face it, that's the point of all of this, right? Now, some of you old school folks have been listening to me forever. Remember that this data that's in Google Search Console used to be in Google Analytics. We used to be able to see what we were ranking for and how much volume each of these searches were sending us.

1:38And now that's just a big nothing. It doesn't tell you what you said. They took it all out of there. But it still lives in Google Search Console. So I find that it is one of the least understood and most ignored tools. And here's the beauty. It's free. There are a whole lot of tools that are built on the back of this that they charge$199 a month for. If you just figure out how to actually tweak it and use it, it is a tool that can give you even better data, can inform decisions going forward so that you can improve your conversion, improve your business. So I'm going to go through five different things that I think ways that you ought to be thinking about using Google Search Console.

2:17And don't worry if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, my head hurts. I don't want to learn another tool. This is something that we do as part of our strategy first engagements, as part of building a search visibility system rather than SEO. I'm calling it SVS, search visibility, because that's what really matters. That tool or that system is something that we can do for you. So if you're not, if you hear something today, you're like, that's brilliant. I don't want to do it. Just contact us, Duct Tape Marketing, and we will help you find the answers to making this work for you. So number one, use Google Search Console to discover intent and content opportunities.

3:00So you want to understand what people are actually searching for when they find your site, first of all, and align your future content with those real queries. So there are a number of sections in Google Search Console. I won't do a tutorial and I want to focus on the high impact things I think you can do today. But one of the sections is called performance. So if you go to performance, search results, queries, you're going to be able to filter in pages, filter your pages that have impressions, but low click-through rate. Those are just things that are on there. It'll be very obvious to you what those are.

3:37It shows you the number of impressions that that page got in the last whatever period. But it also shows you the percentage of the people that saw that page that clicked on it. So it shows you the content you're showing up for, but not converting on. And often that means because your title or your metadata or maybe the content itself showed up for Google interpreted the intent, but the user didn't think that it met what they were searching for. So it just it basically just gives you a roadmap to things you ought to be improving. You're already showing up for those. But now, you know, how do you improve that?

4:11You can mine for long tail searches. One of the things that I find happens all the time is that people today have gotten really good at searching exactly what they want. I mean, and AI is making this even worse because you can write a book into AI and it'll give you the results. But people are doing longer searches, these very detailed searches. Well, a lot of times they pretty much show their intent in that search. And even though there may be very little volume for that, one of the things that I have found is sometimes when you look at pages that are getting traffic, what they're ranking for, it might be 30 or 40 different search terms that you're ranking for for that page.

4:49there just isn't much volume in it. But the intent is so high that even if it's 10 a month, capturing those 10 and really optimizing your page for those with blog posts, FAQs, even Google business page Q &As, you start to actually capture more of that in more places. And that's high intent. Leveraging Google search for local and branded visibility signals. So one of the things that you want to be paying attention to is, are there searches for your name, your competitors' names, plus reviews or plus type of service? And what that does is it tells you that people are trying to validate businesses, types of businesses.

5:35So you create branded FAQs around those searches, testimonials, reviews that actually address those. So mine all of your reviews and look for, put those on your website, getting those kind of search terms in there. All right, number three, use Google Search Console to measure the right metrics. Not rankings, trust and visibility. So get away from ranking and think in terms of search visibility, click-through rates, and your top converting pages. So if I'm an agency, I'm going to start showing clients their overall presence is growing. Because to me, rankings bounce around every time there's some update to the algorithm because of the way people try to manipulate them.

6:29But your overall presence growing, the total number of queries that are appearing in the top 10, your average click through across all branded and non-branded terms, it really shows you how well your content earns trust, quite frankly, in the search engines. And then your impression growth on new pages or sections. Really, overall presence is something that that needs to be the new metric. It may be sound kind of fuzzy because it's like, what does that all add up to? but it's the growth of it. Getting that number to go in the right direction, I think, is what's really key. There are technical aspects that Google Search Console can help you fix.

7:07So indexing, crawled ability issues, load time for your website. So you definitely want to take a look at, are there pages that Google's excluding? Why? In some cases, you've told it to exclude those, but I'm finding that in a lot of cases, they can't get to pages or entire sections of websites or their URLs that really are the wrong URLs like you've updated pages and you've changed names I mean people do things like that all the time is the sitemap updated is mobile performance solid that is a huge huge one it is they never tell you what the ranking factors are but I I've seen it myself every time a site slows down because we haven't been paying attention or we haven't updated something or they've uploaded, somebody's uploaded a giant image that makes the homepage take forever to load, rankings tank.

7:58So there's clearly a direct tie. All right. And the last one I want to talk about is guiding. Google Search Console will help guide your AI content, or at least your AI content optimization, right? So you can do the, you know, you can feed actually the data from Google Search Console right into ChatGPT and then type in something like, based on these queries from Google Search Console, give them a list of your top 10, right? Help create content briefs that addresses these questions clearly and builds trust for a small business offering whatever service you offer. That kind of thing is going to give you such a head start, not into just what content that you produce, but the right content.

8:47And that's the best starting point. And so again, I've just scratched the surface on what I think are some of the key things that you ought to be thinking about from this highly underutilized tool. This is a part of what we call a search visibility system that we've created as part of the strategy work that we do for clients to help them really develop that whole content roadmap, to help them be focused on the right content, to really be focused on intent. And I think that to take nothing else away from today. We need to be spending most of our content information around intent, around searches, branded searches for the things that people are looking that clearly does determine, that we can determine probably means they're trying to buy something.

9:31Spend our time and effort there on conversions. Don't worry about traffic, worry about visibility and overall impressions. All right, that's it for today. Again, And if you want any help, I want to learn more about this. It's just john at ducttapemarketing.com. I'd love to show you what we do and hopefully keep tuning in to the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. And I'll keep talking about the new SEO, among other things. Hopefully we'll see you one of these days out there on the road.