SEO Is Not That Hard

Search Console Integration Demo

• Edd Dawson

Share episode

Send us a text

You can see the video tutorial on Youtube here

SEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.com

You can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tips

To get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO and get a 7 day FREE trial of our Standard Plan book a demo with me now

See Edd's personal site at edddawson.com

Ask me a question and get on the show Click here to record a question

Find Edd on Linkedin, Bluesky & Twitter

Find KeywordsPeopleUse on Twitter @kwds_ppl_use

"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Speaker 1:

Hi, ed here, Just letting you know that this is a bonus episode where I'm going to put the audio on from the YouTube video where I demo how to use our new Google Search Console integration at Keywords People Use. So I just thought I'd put it on the podcast feed as well, because you know some people might like to listen to just the audio. I will put a link to where you can find the YouTube video in the description, in the notes of this podcast. So yeah, I hope you enjoy it and I'll leave it with you.

Speaker 1:

Hi, it's Ed Dawson here from Keywords People Use, and today we're going to look at how we can take our content management to the next level by actually optimising the content on our sites based on the real keywords people are using, whether actually finding our sites and how we can improve our discoverability in Google. So we'll do that by going to content tools on our site and then go to sites. Now here you can actually connect your Google account to keywords people use and then actually connect your Google search console properties to QSP Google use, so we can then actively look at what content Google is indexing for your site and then we can also crawl that content on your site to find out whether you're mentioning the right key phrases, are covering the right content on your pages, if you're able to perform the best in Google. So let's look at a few examples. Examples so here we can see we've got three sites connected. For each site, it tells us how many pages are um been crawled and indexed, how many queries we found from google search console that cover um that site. So it's going to vary a bit on here and these are only demo sites. They're not the biggest ones. We've got one page 332 queries for this one. 11 pages 40 queries for this one, and four pages 15 queries for this one. Also tells us when we last updated the data for these sites and at the time of recording this was this morning, at the 9th of october 2024, and these will crawl and update on a daily basis and to keep your site information up to date as you go through and optimize your content. So we just have to click on one to go into it to see the details all about it.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so here we are in the results for the site broadbandspeedtestcoin, and this is just some background. It's a one-page site which is broadband speed speed tester, targeted to India and it's one of our demo sites that we use when we're testing things. So on here, this is the basic dashboard and we've got two ways of looking at the data. We've got the queries view and the pages view. Now this is. Queries view is when we're looking just purely all the queries that this site has ranked for over the time period we're looking for in Google and where Google has, you know, at least given this keyword an impression. So this, it may not have been clicked, but this site has generated impressions on these keywords. The other view is to look at pages and the page view. As I say, in this site there is only one page on this site, but if this site had more pages, then we would see every single page on this site that Google had in its index and which had generated impressions on queries over the time period in question. So we'll construct on the queries tab first.

Speaker 1:

Now, here, obviously at the top here, we can set our date range and this is the date range that we're going to look at. Data between Now, this is usually set when you first add a site to QHP4U's. We will go back around about a month, 30 odd days, to get the last 30 days worth of data. We don't go back further than that because obviously the whole point of this is we're trying to optimize the content and we want to see how the content is ranking at the moment. So we don't go and look at a huge amount of historical data, but we will start collecting data going forward from this date to build up a historical view over time of how your performance changes are going basically.

Speaker 1:

So also in here we've also got a search for a query. So if we want to quickly just narrow down any kind of query sets, we can do that. So we can do a search there and this will bring back all the queries that contain whatever we've put in the search box. Here. Let's just clear that for now we'll get back to the main set. Then we have a bunch of filters here. So this is where we can perform actions filter actions on the data so we can start to narrow down to discover which pieces of content and which queries we want to be optimizing our content for, based on this information that we've got from Google Search Console about how real people are interacting and how our site is ranking in the Google Search. Now, before we dive into what all the different filters are.

Speaker 1:

Let's just look at what the actual data is here that we are showing. So we've, first of all, we've got a little indicator here of how many results we've got in the current data set that we're looking at. So here we've got 321 queries at the moment. Obviously, the first heading is your query and then the number is the order of which it's in. Then we have pages. So this number is how many pages we found that this particular query is ranking for. So all of these queries here are already being ranking on one page. We'll see examples later of other sites where a query can be on more than one page.

Speaker 1:

Mentions is a real key one. This is where we've actually crawled the website and because we've called the contact website, we know how many times this particular keyword is mentioned on the website. So here we can see this. This top performing um query has actually mentioned zero times on the website. Now, that's interesting. We're not mentioning it at all. Maybe it's something we should be thinking about. The one below obviously we can see that's mentioned five times on the site.

Speaker 1:

Next, we've got unique impressions. So this is how many unique impressions of this query were generated on Google during the time period that's specified. So we can see here that this query generated 315 impressions on Google over that time period that specified. So we can see here that this query generated 315 impressions on Google over that time period. So this appeared in the results for 315 actual, real searches.

Speaker 1:

Best position shows the highest position that this site, this page query, ranked for. So we know that the best position we had was 9.47. There's a lot of, there's a lot of precision in here, but yeah, let's just take you could. That's just basically the highest that we we ranked for this um query over the time period. Total clicks is how many clicks we generated through google during this period. So this page generated zero clicks, unfortunately. So it has an average click-through rate of zero, whereas the page below generated one click of 219 impressions, which gives it a 0.5% click-through rate. So that's the data we've got here so we can start to understand how we're performing for each one of these keywords, these queries, and how we might be able to perform better With this interface.

Speaker 1:

We can obviously sort the results based on these headers that we've got here, so you can see the ones we want. At the moment we're sorting by unique impressions. So the site, the page with the most unique impressions, we sort on first. But we can change the sort to be by best position, ascending or descending. This shows the ones where they the sort to be by best position, ascending or descending. So this shows the ones where they're ranking for in the best position to start with. We can also sort by the ones with the most clicks if we want. So we can sort the descending here and we'll see the ones with the most clicks. Finally, with all these queries, when we're looking at the query level, we can click on the actual query itself. It will show us which pages, which actually urls on the site, are ranking for this and it can obviously in many cases be more than one url that will rank for the same query and within each one of those it shows you how many times we've got a mention on that page, the url, the times of amount of impressions this particular page generated and the minimum or the best position. So obviously the best minimum is one that means you're ranking position one. So the minimum minimum position that we've seen this page ranking in Google search console and the number of clicks that particular page has driven itself and we can just click back off the query to close it up again. We can open multiple ones and see them like that here to compare.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's look now at the filters that we've got here that help you start to discover what content actually needs optimizing on the site, based on this huge amount of data that we've collected Now. So this is just a small example of a site. You know we have also run this with other major sites, such as Keywords. People Use Itself whether we have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of pages, lines of data, and that data is all fine and good having it, but what we need to do is drill down to find the areas of best opportunity, and these filters will help us do that.

Speaker 1:

So let's go through them one by one. So the first filter I'm going to use is on page two Now. If we click this, it's now going to find all the pages sorry, all the queries that are ranking, but on page two. So these are the ones where you only need a little bump to get onto page one to increase your rankings, increase your traffic. I'm now going to add up my second filter here, which is our no mentions filter. As I said, what we do is we, as well as getting this data from google search console, we also go and crawl every page of your site that is indexed in search console so we can then see what the content on that page is now here I've done the no mentions filter and this is where we can compare the queries that are showing up with the content on the actual page that these queries are showing up for. And no mentions means literally no mentions here. So these are keywords, queries that we're ranking for on page two because we've got that filter on as well where we don't mention the actual query. So this is something where google's decided we're obviously a good candidate for this keyword, but yeah, we'll run page two if we weren't, but we don't actually mention it on the page and often just mentioning on the page or in the title because we also check the title just mentioning this query could be the difference between booking us from page two onto page one and especially if we look again here at the best position and if we sort this ascending, we will then see these are all queries where we are just in position 11, 12,. You know we're only just on page two, but maybe if we went and updated the content on the page just to mention these queries, we could just push us over the edge up onto page one and start getting traffic on these keywords. Okay, so I'm gonna unclick these two now. So remove these two filters.

Speaker 1:

And now let's look at some of the other filters. So the next one is questions. Now, this is where we've gone specifically through all the queries that Google is ranking you for and we are asking it to copy the question type. So that's like what, how is when, et cetera. With these we can then see because obviously we love questions that keywords people use. That's what our philosophy is based on. So here we can see these are some questions where we're ranking for these. But we can see these are some questions where you know we're ranking for these. But we can see here there's plenty of opportunities to do better, because there's plenty with no mentions on the page.

Speaker 1:

We are getting impressions and you know our position in some cases, like this one what is my internet speed? We're not mentioning it, we're on page, just on page two there for that one. This is one where we could really get some um difference made here if we just included this on the track on the page on the content we could. We could potentially be pushing this up onto page one, so I'm going to reset questions there back to our original. We've got one here unique impressions greater than 500 and if we do this one, then it will show you, show us queries that are getting more than 500 impressions over a time period. In this case it does not for this site, so I won't bother clicking that one.

Speaker 1:

Now. We can concentrate only on queries that are driving no clicks. So this is where we want to be concentrating just on those that are driving no clicks at all and how we can improve them to try and maybe raise their ranking, that are driving no clicks at all and how we can improve them to try and maybe raise their ranking. We can then also look for those where the best position is greater than 10. So that means these are pages that aren't ranking on page one. We might decide we don't want to look at pages on page one, so this will only bring in those that are ranking on page two or lower. Or we might decide actually we're only going to concentrate on those on page one and see if they can, going to shift from, like, say, page see a best position. Page three, no mentions this one. We could potentially get up into the top position just by a little bit of work. So I will clear that that's yeah. So with these filters we can then really tie down onto which particular keywords we want to be concentrating.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so that covers looking at things from the query point of view. The other point of view, the other point of view we can look at, and probably the one that is probably the most important I'd say, is pages. Okay, because obviously it's pages that we're trying to rank better. So on this site here we've only got one page because it's a single page speed tester site. So I'm gonna come back out back into sites. I going to pick a slightly different one. So I'm going to look at horsemanagebuilderscouk, another one of our test sites, just for this is what the site is. If you don't know what horsemanage is, it's these all weather arenas, basically, that people use to exercise and train their horses in.

Speaker 1:

So going back here obviously with it defaults to the query view, but we want to look at the page view on this one. So we're going to click pages and this shows us the pages that are ranking on this site. So again, it's just a small site, so there's just four different pages here at the moment, but we can see here now we can delve into each individual page and we can see what keywords that this page is actually ranking for in google search console. And again we have got the same headings across the top here. So mentions that's the number of times on this page that, um, this keyword is mentioned, the impressions that we're getting on this over the time period selected, the page position and the best query position. So to explain these two, page position is this is the position that this query is ranking for on this particular page. So down this column, this is where we know that this page is ranking for each one of these queries. Now, best query position shows where the best position we've got ranking across all pages on the site. So if you see these numbers being different, then you know that this one here, which means that we've got a better page ranking for this query. So if this page position here was, say, 19.75, and this was 9.75, we'd know that we've got another page that's ranking better for this query than the current page that we are looking at the details on. This is important later, the number of clicks we're getting and the clicks rate on these the same data as we saw before.

Speaker 1:

We've got the same filters which work exactly the same way as before, but we've got one extra one here called no cannibalization. So I'll show you now an example of where this no cannibalization filter comes in. So what we're going to do is go back out two pages. We're going to go to the about page on the site here and what you'll see here is we've got two queries that this page is ranking for menage construction and Horse Menage Construction, which it mentions on the page many times. It's getting impressions for it, but if you look here, we've got the page position 65 and 67 for these. So it's ranking down on sort of page 67 for these it's not really ranking, but the best query position for all our pages on site is 13 and 9.75. So this identifies at a glance that there is another page ranking better for these keywords than this one. Okay, and in that case this is where we don't really want to be trying to boost this page, because we've already got a page ranking really, really well. It's that page that we should be going to concentrate on. So what we do is when we're running through these filters, we can click this no cannibalization filter which will remove any query for when we're looking at this page, any query where there's another page on site ranking better than it. Okay, so it stops you in essentially trying to improve the wrong page and cannibalize the query as far as Google is concerned. So you don't want to cannibalize any query when we've got another page that's ranking better for that. We should really be concentrating for that keyword on the page that is already ranking really, really well for it. So that's how that no cannibalization filter works and cuts those out which we can see just there.

Speaker 1:

Okay, we're going to go back to the pages tab again here now and just one important thing to show you here against each one of these pages, you'll see there is a little refresh button here now. This, if you hover over it, will tell you when this page was last crawled. So this is when we're looking at total mentions and we're looking at what keywords are mentioned on the page. This is based on a crawl on that time and date. So if you have gone and made changes to a page and you want to update the statistics on site when it comes to mentions, you can just click a little refresh there and the system will go away. Fetch a fresh copy of the content on that page and update the database so that you can then see the mentions grow and build up as you go and edit your content.

Speaker 1:

Just one last thing to cover before we finish. You're not restricted to only accessing this data inside Keyword People Use. You can obviously export it. We've got export data to a CSV file on both the pages and then on the queries here as well, so you can click any of these and download the data that you've got, selecting your query at any point, and export in CSV and put it into any other system that you want to use it with. It takes CSV, so be it into Excel, google Sheets, anything like that. Yeah, the data's yours and you freestyle load it and use it, however you need to to get the best out of it. So that completes our review of the Google Search Console integration and the content crawling feature. With this feature, you'll be able to constantly monitor how your pages are ranking and for which queries and, more importantly, identify those queries where a small amount of content optimization can make a big difference to your rankings and, ultimately, your traffic.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Edd Dawson

Host