Hello all!
Welcome back to another issue of our monthly newsletter, where we discuss tactical tips and tricks that content marketers can apply to their strategies.
This month, we’re covering how to use and interpret data from Google Search Console (GSC) to supercharge your content marketing results.
Impressions are sometimes cited as a vanity metric. We’d beg to differ.
That is, GSC impressions are a great way to see under the hood of the website. They communicate that:
Let’s talk about three of the most common impression trends you’re likely to encounter and how you should approach them.
1) Impressions are steadily trending upward
If you log into GSC and see that the entire website’s impressions are steadily growing or that the impressions for an individual URL are steadily growing, you can generally assume that your organic marketing program is working.
That information communicates that Google is successfully finding, crawling, and indexing your website.
As you post more content and rankings continue to rise for more and more keywords (GSC calls these queries), you should continue to see growing impressions.
As you grow more accustomed to what GSC is telling you, you can even dive into brand vs. nonbrand query impression growth to make sure that all your marketing is contributing to the overall growth and interest of your brand and product over time.
2) Impressions are high, but clicks are low
High impressions and low clicks happen for several reasons that are worth understanding.
If impressions are high, it’s typically because your content is on page 1. However, if clicks are low while the impressions are high, you should check the following:
3) Impressions are extremely volatile
Impressions are a great way to determine that something has drastically changed with the way Google is displaying our website. If you’re seeing impressions (or clicks) all over the map for a particular URL, check out the following.
Clicks are the golden metric that your SEO is working and your title tags are compelling. But they communicate several other things to the content and SEO practitioner.
Let’s look at two of the most common trends you’ll see in click data.
1) Click growth or click decline
Generally speaking, if your clicks are growing, that means one piece of content is continuing to rank higher for more keywords, or your website overall has more content ranking as you continue to publish.
And the same goes for steady click declines. Declines typically happen as you lose rankings due to content decay (pieces ages out, intent changes, or a competitor updates their content).
Updating your content or consolidating to match intent should help you recover those clicks.
Click growth and decline can also signify the relative authority of your website over time.
If you have a lot of content on your website, but your brand and product marketing aren’t generating attention, PR, and important backlink-building efforts - it can be difficult for a website to maintain rankings as you lose “relevance” to the market.
2) Dramatic drops
Dramatic drops in GSC clicks always set off the alarm bells for marketing teams.
Here is why you might see significant click drops within Google Search Console:
Queries, or GSC’s term for what SEOs call keywords, can communicate a ton of useful information to us about our content.
1) What queries are we ranking for (matching intent for)
The first thing we learn from our queries is which URLS from our website Google is serving searchers based on what they type into the engine.
So now we know exactly what keywords we’re ranking for which pages and which generate the most traffic and visibility for us.
*Pro Tip: As Nate Turner shared in a Content That Grows podcast episode (below), you’ll often choose to write an article about a topic for reasons related to customer interest or ICP data without having a keyword target.
That’s right, you can create content without SEO in mind.
You can go back into GSC a couple of months later and see what queries Google thinks your post is most aligned with. It can often be worth modifying that initial post to make it rank and receive more consistent traffic when you find a worthwhile query.
2) The number of queries over time
If you’re trying to determine if you need to modify and update a piece of content to match intent or if the piece needs backlinks, there is a general rule of thumb that you can follow.
The easy way to think about it:
3) Target semantically related queries and easier wins
If you’re looking for keyword ideas that will:
…then, GSC is one of your best tools for identifying your future roadmap.
Instead of focusing all your time and energy on celebrating the queries that are generating a lot of clicks, focus your attention on another area.
Look at which queries are coming up under your best-performing pieces of content that are not generating clicks and don’t rank in the top 20 positions (on average).
The terms at the bottom often give you a good idea of what Google believes are semantically related topics, but they don’t think your particular post is a good candidate to rank for that query.
Instead, if you find queries you’d like to rank for by doing this search, you can add them to the roadmap for future content pieces.
*Pro Tip: You can tell if targeting one of these keywords with a new article will internally compete (be too similar) with your existing one by doing this:
If those two SERPs are nearly identical in the content they display, then don’t build a separate article to target those two queries. You’ll likely want to add in a section to be sure you’re expanding your intent coverage.
If those two SERPs look very different, especially the articles at the top of page 1, then you can feel free to target both of the queries using two different articles.
With this information, you should be able to use GSC data to interpret, diagnose, and make necessary decisions related to your content.
And you might even impress your SEO counterparts.
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[Watch/Listen 👁️👂] The AI and Marketing Hype Machine
Nate and Derek are back to talk about the hype surrounding AI in the marketing industry - discussing how impactful AI will likely be and how it will be used within various content marketing efforts
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[Read 📖] How to identify ALL your content that needs consolidating
Consolidation is one of the easiest and most effective ways to get a lot of content under control and performing. See how to identify your website's opportunities here.
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[Read 📖] What Is Content Decay? How To Identify and Fix for Organic Growth
For any company trying to scale its blog and drive meaningful business results, it is critical to understand content decay and how it impacts your growth. Learn more here.
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[Read 📖] 3 Common Technical SEO Issues [+ Tools & Resources to Fix Them]
The following three technical SEO issues can significantly impact your website's ability to be crawled and indexed. See how you can use GSC and other tools to fix the problem confidently.
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