Google Search Console is a great way to start optimizing the keywords on a website for both beginners and SEO professionals. Many keywords on your site are probably ranking just a bit too low to generate meaningful traffic, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing in there you can use. Your website is probably sitting on a gold mine of keywords. This is where keyword research tools come in handy, as they can give you a great understanding of search demand and help you find new content opportunities to target. In this post, our SEO agency in Chicago will help you improve your traffic by using Google Search Console as a keyword ranking tool. By the end of this article, you will be able to make quick and informed optimizations, improve keyword rankings, and reach more users.
Table of Contents
- What is Google Search Console?
- Using Google Search Console Features
- How to use Google Search Console as a Keyword Ranking Tool
- Final Thoughts
What is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is a free web service that allows website owners and search marketing professionals to monitor their websites’ health and performance in the Google search engine. Examining an overview of search performance metrics allows marketers to improve their websites in order to generate more traffic. The most important features of Google Search Console are:
- Monitoring indexing and crawling
- Identifying and fixing errors and potential site-performance problems
- Search performance metrics
- Requesting indexing of updated pages
- Reviewing internal and external links
How Can Google Search Console Keyword Ranking Features Help You?
If you want to get valuable insights about your website’s performance in search results, Google Search Console is a great tool. It provides keyword rank tracking tools you can use to see which keywords your website is currently ranking for and how it ranks for those keywords. There are many cases in which using Google Search Console for accurate SEO rank tracking can come in handy. You should regularly use its features to check how your website ranks in search engines for your target keywords. This is especially important if you’ve recently performed a website content migration and want to preserve hard-earned page rankings.
Here are more scenarios in which you can benefit from using Google Search Console keyword ranking features:
- Finding underperforming keywords and improving their rankings
- Optimizing web pages with low click-through rates (CTR)
- Identifying opportunities for new content
- Monitoring the impact of website changes on your keyword positions
How to get started with Google Search Console
Let’s check the steps you need to take to add your website to Google Search Console and use its features.
The first step is verifying website ownership. There are several ways to do this, depending on whether you are attempting to verify a website, a domain, a Google-hosted site, or a blogger-hosted website.
Google-hosted websites are automatically verified once you add them to Google Search Console. If your website is not registered with Google Domains, you can use one of the following methods:
- HTML file upload
- Meta tag
- Google Analytics tracking code
- Google Tag Manager
Though some hosting platforms have certain limitations regarding things that can be uploaded, most of them provide a comprehensive guide through the verification process.
Verifying website ownership
There are two common ways to verify website ownership for sites that are not hosted on Google, such as WordPress websites:
- HTML file upload
- Meta tag
HTML file upload
Verifying site ownership by uploading a special HTML file is very straightforward. You can do it within minutes by following these steps:
- The first thing you need to do is enter the Google Search Console and open the Property sector dropdown menu in the top left corner.
- Navigate to Select Property Type, enter your URL, and click Continue.
- Now, choose the HTML file upload method and download the HTML file. The next step is to upload the HTML file to the root of your website. Note that the root of your website is https://example.com/. With that in mind, if the file you downloaded is called verification.html, the uploaded file should be located at https://example.com/verification.html.
- The only thing left to do is to click on Verify in the Google Search Console.
This verification method may look slightly different if you use a website hosting platform. In such cases, make sure to find information about Google Search Console verification in your host’s documentation. But even if you can’t find any information, the described method may still work – so give it a shot.
Meta tag verification
Another way to verify your site ownership is by placing a specific meta tag in your homepage’s source code. This verification method is great for those who have trouble uploading HTML files. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Click on the Verify link for your website, and then choose the Add a meta tag verification option.
- You’ll get a specific meta tag that should look similar to this: <meta name= “verify-v1” content= “unique-string”>
- Place that code in the first <head> section of the source code of your homepage. Make sure to place it before any <body> section on that page. Also, remember that you shouldn’t place this meta tag inside any other tag within the <head> section.
This method may not work if your homepage doesn’t have HTML content, as there needs to be a <head> section in its source code.
Using Google Search Console Features
In this section of our article, we’ll explore various features you can use once you access Google Search Console. We’ll also explain how to benefit from each of these features.
The Performance Report
The Performance Report lets you see how your website performs in the Google search engine. You have the option to explore the following search types:
- Web
- Image
- Video
- News
The web search type is shown by default, but you can change the type by clicking on the Search Type button.
Once you do that, a pop-up menu will appear where you can choose the search type to preview.
You can even compare the performance of two different search types. You’ll notice four metrics at the top of the Performance Report. These are:
- Total Clicks
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR (click-through rate)
- Average Position
Note that Total Clicks and Total Impressions are selected in the chart below by default. You can change the metrics displayed in the chart by clicking on the dedicated tabs.
Impressions
Impressions represent the number of times your website appeared in search results. However, if your website is ranked near the bottom of the page, it still gets an impression even if the user didn’t scroll to that section. This metric can give you valuable insight into your website’s visibility in the search results. If you have a high number of impressions for a particular keyword, it means that your website is showing up in the SERPs for that keyword a lot – and the opposite. If you notice a drop in impressions, take it as a signal that you may need to make some changes to your website or your SEO strategy.
To fully understand the significance of impressions, we need to explore the Clicks and the Average Position metrics.
Clicks
As the name suggests, the clicks metric represents the number of times users clicked on your website in the SERP. You should aim for a high number of clicks combined with a high number of impressions. Having a high number of impressions and a low number of clicks usually means that your website needs improvements to attract more traffic. The clicks metric can tell you a lot about how effectively your website attracts visitors from Google searches. It would be best to monitor your clicks, as this can help you find website areas that require improvement.
Average CTR
As you can guess, CTR stands for “click-through rate.” The percentage representing the average CTR shows how often users clicked on your website from the SERP. The higher the percentage, the better the website is performing.
Now, you might be wondering what a good click-through rate is. Well, it really depends on several factors, such as:
- Your industry
- Competition
- The type of content you’re offering
Why is it important to track your average CTR? Because the click-through rate is a good indicator of how well your website is performing in search results – with real people. If you notice a low average CTR, you might want to learn how to make a headline more compelling and work on improving your descriptions. But it could also mean you need to rank higher for your target keywords. Your average CTR may rise once you improve search rankings for your pages, as the first few results in SERPS usually attract most of the traffic.
It’s always a bright idea to regularly check click-through rates to see if there’s a need for changes. We also advise you to keep an eye on your CTR for various search queries and individual pages. By doing so, you’ll get a clearer picture of which areas on your website need improvement.
Average Position
This metric shows your website’s average position in the SERP. The higher your average position, the more visible your website is to potential visitors. If your website takes average positions from 1 to 10, it ranks exceptionally high. Websites that take average positions between 20 and 29 appear on page two or three of the search results. While these are not bad ranking spots, you should look for ways to improve your website performance to get it closer to the top 10. Suppose your average position is consistently low for specific queries or keywords. In that case, it could mean you must improve your website’s content, structure, or optimization strategies for those specific areas.
Websites that average positions lower than 30 often need significant improvements. It may be the case that the website ranks for many low-ranking keywords and a few that rank high. That’s when you need to check your content in search of a gap. The content gap appears when the content that ranks for a specific keyword is not strong enough. Usually, a dedicated web page devoted to that keyword does the trick here.
Performance report dimensions
As you scroll down the Performance page, you’ll notice six Dimensions of a website’s performance data. These are:
- Queries: The top search queries along with the number of clicks and impressions for each keyword (this is the dimension we are the most interested in).
- Pages: Your top-performing web pages with their clicks and impressions.
- Countries: Top-performing countries with associated clicks and impressions.
- Devices: The devices that generate traffic to your website are segmented into mobile, desktop, and tablet.
- Search Appearance: This dimension shows the different types of rich results in which your website was displayed. You can also check if Google displayed your website using Web Light results (optimized for very slow devices) and video results along with associated clicks and impressions.
- Dates: This dimension displays your clicks and impressions by date, whether in descending or ascending order.
Keywords
We have finally navigated to the Performance Report section containing our article’s main topic: keywords.
The keywords are featured in the Queries dimension of the Performance Report. This part of the report displays the top 1,000 search queries that drove the traffic to your website. Here, we should pay special attention to those low-performing queries.
While some queries display low traffic because they are rare (also known as long-tail traffic), others are simply associated with web pages that need improvement.
Make sure to always inspect low-performing keywords. Some of them may have untapped potential for quick wins that can significantly increase traffic to your website if the issue is addressed correctly. That brings us to our next topic – using Google Search Console as a keyword ranking tool.
How to use Google Search Console as a Keyword Ranking Tool
Technically speaking, Google Search Console isn’t designed to be primarily a keyword ranking tool or to compete with popular keyword tools. It’s focused on providing website owners with insights about their website’s performance in Google search results.
However, Google Search Console data can still give you valuable insights into the keywords that your website is appearing for. There are even cases in which you can use it to enhance your keyword research process. In this section, we’ll explore some interesting ways in which you can use GSC as a keyword ranking tool:
Find Valuable Keywords With Lower Ranks
It often happens that your website pages are filled with valuable keywords ranking just a bit too low to get clicks. New content opportunities are always a great way to get more visitors, so finding keywords that are only within striking distance is significant. This is where metadata and on-page copy edits are constructive, as they can boost their ratings and generate clicks. However, you may wonder how to check Google Search Console’s keyword ranking. To do so, just follow these simple steps:
- Open Google Search Console
- Click on Search Results (located under the Performance tab)
- Click “Average CTR” and “Average Position” (the data should populate below)
- Scroll down and sort by CTR (low to high)
- Choose those keywords that are ranking well but not getting many clicks
- Make metadata and copy edits targeting these words
After following those steps, you’ll quickly realize that Google Search Console can serve you well as a keyword position checker tool. It can help you find exciting keyword opportunities you can take to either enhance your existing content or create new blog posts that will satisfy users’ search intents.
Optimize Relevant Long-Tail Keywords
Although Google Search Console is not best known as a keyword research tool, it sure can serve as one. Besides telling you which keywords get clicks for which pages, The Queries Report in GSC can also tell you which long-tail keywords are already related to your page, so you can further optimize them within your content. Here is how to use Google Search Console to enhance your keyword research process:
- Open Google Search Console
- Click on Search Results (located under the Performance tab)
- In the filter row click “+ New,” then select “Page…”
- Enter the URL you want to optimize and click “Apply.”
- Scroll down to look for keywords for which your page has shown in Google search results
- Look for long-tail keywords to further optimize
- Make metadata and copy edits targeting these words
Find Competing Keywords Ranking on Multiple URLs
If a keyword ranks for multiple URLs on a website, then these pages compete with each other for visibility. This can affect both pages’ organic keyword rankings. You can use Google Search Console to find such pages and edit the on-page copy and metadata to help search engines favor one page over the other. Here are the instructions on how to do this:
- Open Google Search Console
- Click on Search Results (located under the Performance tab)
- Click “+New” in the filter row, then select “Query…”
- Type in a valuable target keyword
- Scroll down and click the “Pages” tab (located next to Queries. Countries etc.)
- Look for competing pages
- Make metadata and copy edits to optimize the keywords on the most appropriate page
- Remove these keywords from other pages if possible
Our SEO experts in Chicago believe that these approaches are a quick and easy way for keyword optimizations. Just by following these simple steps, you can maximize your keywords ranking, enhance your keyword research and reach more users.
Final Thoughts
In many ways, Google Search Console keyword ranking tools can help you enhance your SEO efforts. We at Alpha Efficiency have been successfully utilizing GSC for years. Here is a short recap of different ways you can utilize it as a keyword ranking tool:
- Check keywords that are driving the most traffic to your website: This can give you a good idea of which keywords you should focus on in your content strategy.
- See which pages on your website are ranking for which keywords: Using Google Search Console as a keyword ranking tool can help you identify opportunities and optimize these pages for better rankings in search engines.
- Find competing pages on your website: This will help you make necessary adjustments for increasing the search rankings of all of these pages.
- Use GSC as a keyword ranking tracking tool: By checking the performance of your keywords in SERPs, you can get a sense of whether your SEO efforts are paying off.
We firmly believe every website owner should have a Google Search Console account. It’s a free tool that can bring you a lot of success online if you use it correctly.
