There are many tools to improve your SEO strategy. Perhaps you use (and pay for) a combination of tools to analyze your website's data. Meet Google Search Console Insights: one of the newest and most requested tools for SEO improvement. Want to know more about your audience and what they want to see from your website? In this article, I'll tell you how you can use this tool to grow your website.

What is Search Console Insights & what is it made for?

Search Console Insights is a free platform that allows you to optimize your SEO results. You do this with the help of data collected via Search Console and Google Analytics. It gives you as a user an overview of the statistics of your website and analyzes the content performance from a technical point of view. It allows you to detect problems with your pages and helps you to tailor the pages to the needs of your users. It is a useful tool that marketers and SEO specialists need and appreciate.

‍

Google Search Console Insights (GSCI) was created to help business and website owners with search engine optimization. It is a guide to improve and see statistics, such as:

• Keyword positions
• Average duration of page views
• Quality of content
• Usage of the website

‍

How do I get started with Search Console?

To get started, sign up for Google's Search Console, add your site and verify it! It's pretty simple, but it takes a few steps. Let me break those down for you.

1. Log into Google Search Console with your Google Analytics account so they sync. As I mentioned earlier, GSCI retrieves website performance data from both pages.
2. Click on "Add a Property.
3. Choose a domain or URL (preferably a domain).
4. Confirm with (for example) your hosting provider that you are the owner of that property, whether it is a domain or URL. 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. Click on the 'Overview' tab and select 'Search Console Insights' at the top of this page. In the Google app, click on your profile picture and select 'Search Console Insights' from the account menu.
2. Access via 'Google Search in Search Results'.
   ‍

Once you have access to the tool, you should check occasionally to make sure everything is running smoothly. Expert recommend once a month or when you have added new content. If GSCI detects unusual activity on your website, you will receive an email alert.

How do I turn GSCI data into SEO solutions?

Now that we know what Google Search Console Insights is, let's move on to using the data collected to optimize our website's organic search engine rankings. Instead of drawing your own conclusions by looking at the clear charts and analysis, GSCI will automatically answer the important questions you have asked about your website. On the Search Console Insights overview page, you'll find answers to the following 5 questions:

1. What are your best performing pieces of content?

This insights report shows the best pages based on performance (Your most popular content report). Based on this data, you can prioritize the work on the pages. What type of content attracts the most attention? You can also find out what is trending. GSC uses three badges to help you identify relevant information for your content.

• Top 5 results: this shows that the average organic search position of the this page is in the top 5.
• Trending x%: this compares the past 28 days to how the page performed previously.
• High average duration: higher average duration compared to the other published pages of the website.
  ‍

2. How is your new content performing?

Google Search Console Insights is also useful for analyzing your new pages. Check which of your recently published content is getting quick impressions in Google's search results. To do this, use the "Your new content" report. It shows which new pages were viewed for the first time in the last 28 days, sorted from most to least recent.

We now know which pages Google likes, which we can use to build hypotheses and develop strategies to continue delivering similar content.

3. How do people discover your content on the Internet?

By knowing where people discover your content, you can dramatically change your marketing game to focus on those traffic channels. To understand how people land on your page, GSCI shows you the three most popular traffic sources. They can include categories like organic search, paid search, direct, social and referrals.

Screenshot from Google Search Console Insights.

But to get the most detailed information, you still need to look on Google Search Console, where in the "Performance" report you can open the graph to show the statistics for impressions, click rate and the dimensions for queries and even countries. You can go through the filters that are there to check the performance of specific pages in a specific area.

For example, you can determine where your traffic is coming from by entering a search type filter. If you want to know which pages are generating traffic from image search results, select "Image" when you scroll through the filters. Using the chart, you can see the searches, pages and countries that are generating the most traffic for this particular search.

4. What do people search for on Google before they visit your page?

Here you have access to the section that displays the top 50 searches that send people to your site from Google. These searches are ranked based on the number of times they have been clicked on in a Google SERP.

You have a ranking under each search query and by default this list shows the "Most Searched Searches". You can also switch to the 'Most trending searches' in this list to see which searches have grown the most in terms of clicks in the current versus the past 28 days.

5. What article refers users to your website and content?

The GSCI has a section called 'Referring links from other websites'. This section lets you see how many mentions to a particular web page a specific referring page has generated. This allows you to see which of the linking websites are most relevant to your users. So, you can decide whether you want to continue to post articles on this site or grab the page from which the traffic came. In addition, if you know which links are working well, you can determine your further link building strategy.

What else do I need to think about with GSCI?

Take a moment to see how the data comes up and how your page has improved since using this tool. Keep in mind the following:

• Confirm that Google is linking your content to your main search term. Among other things, I recommend the Google Keyword Planner tool to help you choose the best keywords for your niche and optimize your content with those keywords.
• Prioritize the important web pages. This way, Google will know which sites need to be crawled, so your targeted page can rank much faster and produce better results.
• Fix any problems that occur while browsing your page. You can fix problems with page experience by using Google Search Console's direct guidance.
  ‍

For your information, the data for Google Search Console Insights looks different than Google Analytics. GSCI combines data like page views and average time on page from Google Analytics with search statistics like clicks and average position. In short, one represents the activity that takes place on Google's search bar and the other what happens on your page.

Getting started

Content comes in all shapes and sizes. The content you create can range from daily blog videos and quizzes to informative articles. That content can look great to you, but ultimately you are creating it for your visitor. It's up to the visitor to decide if that content and strategy work.

You can use the data GSCI presents to see where you are exceeding expectations, or where you may be falling short. With this tool in hand, you'll improve your content strategy, increase your visibility in Google's search engine, and expand your audience.

‍