SEO can seem overwhelming, with so much information and numerous tools available.
In less experienced hands, the masses of recommendations from these tools can often waste a lot of time while delivering little in the way of results.
Fortunately, Google Search Console (GSC) offers accurate diagnostic information about your website, including rankings and traffic.
This helps you focus on optimizing well-performing areas, leading to better results.
It’s a more practical approach than spending months or years chasing ideal keywords.
By understanding GSC, you can take this intelligence and build an SEO strategy and a simple SEO plan based on the hard facts of your current situation.
This article outlines a three-step process for reviewing, planning and improving your SEO using Google Search Console metrics. The goal is to guide you in finding the most important information for quick SEO wins.
Google Search Console: 3 steps to easy SEO wins
The process has three simple steps:
Step 1: Review traffic, rankings and opportunities in Google Search Console.
Step 2: Analyze what ranks currently and look for opportunities.
Step 3: Optimize and improve your content to get some easy wins.
This simple approach allows you to easily rank the tasks around the potential so you spend time working on what matters the most and will generate actual results as quickly as possible.
Before analyzing Google Search Console, you need to set it up. You can learn how to do that and cover the basics with this Google help doc.
You can also download our template for tracking opportunities here:
Dig deeper: Google Search Console launches recommendations
Step 1: Review your traffic, rankings and opportunities
The first step is to review your visibility and traffic in Google Search Console. This information will help you understand how well you’re performing and guide you in optimizing your approach.
Sign in to Google Search Console at https://search.google.com/search-console. Review your traffic and indexing overview by clicking on Search results under Performance.
On this screen, you have two of four potential metrics enabled by default:
Total clicks (enabled).
Total impressions (enabled).
Average CTR (disabled).
Average position (disabled).
Above the main metrics, you have filters that, by default, show web search results for the last three months.
Applying additional filters
To make the data here as accurate and relevant as possible, add some additional filters and you would typically look to:
Exclude branded search traffic.
Filter to the primary target geography.
Exclude brand traffic
My business is called Bowler Hat, so you will filter anything that mentions “hat” to cover variants like “bowler hat,” “bowlerhat,” “bowler hats,” etc.
To do this, you will add a new filter (next to the type and duration).
Click New > Query > Queries not containing.
Type “hat” then click Apply.
Do this for your brand name now. If you review the results, you should not see any branded traffic.
Filter to primary target geography
By default, the results shown here will be everything, everywhere, which can skew your results. The best option is to filter this by your primary geography, so you will look at the UK only for this account.
Click New > Country.
Select your country (here I am selecting “United Kingdom”) then click Apply.
This now filters the data so you only see your target country (which makes the clicks, impressions, CTR and rankings much more accurate).
Note: If you are only used to seeing traditional rank reports and the like, this kind of filtering, which removes all organic brand traffic and international traffic, can reveal some hard truths.
If I had a dollar for every time you reviewed a client’s search console and there was practically no unbranded organic traffic, I would have a great big jar of dollars.
At the very least, you will start to understand your traffic accurately, which may challenge some of your perceptions about what works and drives clicks.
Also, should your requirements be a little more complicated, you can read up on regular expressions and create filters to exclude or focus on what matters.
Real traffic analysis
By applying the filters above, what is left represents your real exposure and traffic from Google Search.
The next step is to enable the four key metrics and review them individually.
If you use SEO and PPC, note any keywords and landing page combos that may be useful in your Google Ads campaigns.
Clicks
Clicks are the main goal and what you’re ultimately aiming for.
Here, you will see precisely how many clicks you get for your target search terms.
Impressions
Impressions are how many times you showed up in search results.
The amount of clicks you receive vs impressions gives you an idea of the size of the opportunity.
The screenshot below has a few exciting examples:
305 clicks from 12,743 impressions with a CTR of 2.4% in position 6.5.
53 clicks from 10,687 impressions with a CTR of 0.5% in position 4.6.
Both of these keywords have room for improvement, but the second line needs further investigation due to a woeful CTR (0.5%) from a very reasonable rank (4.6).
CTR