You’ve got the the goods on your website, and now you are getting some search traffic. Success! But if you look at your Google Analytics keyword section, you’ll quickly see that “not provided” is the number one keyword. So, how do you find the out what terms are driving the most organic search traffic to your website?
Search Analytics with Search Console
Google Search Console, formally known as Webmaster Tools, provides incredibly useful data for webmasters to track the effectiveness of their website on Google’s platform. Reports on crawl errors, site maps and security issues can be found there. Also found there, are Search Traffic reports. In my opinion, these are just as important for search engine optimization as many of the reports that the golden child, Google Analytics, provides.
In the Search Traffic reports on Search Console, you can pull reports on your website’s inbound links, internal links, mobile usability and search analytics. Below, we’ll take a look at how the search analytics reports can show you the top queries for your website.
Viewing the Top Search Queries on your Website
In Search Console, click on the website property that is your website. (obvious note: you’ll need to setup your website in search console. This is separate of analytics.). Once in the correct property, navigate over to Performance:
This default report for Search Analytics will be the top queries for the last 28 days. This is actually the basic report that will tell you what queries are generating the most clicks onto your website. While it’s useful information, by playing with the toggles at the top of the page, you’re able to further provide context to the data. Adding impressions shows you how many times that query showed up in a result, and position tells you the average rank.
For even more information on which pages are most successful at generating inbound search traffic, you can click the “Pages” tab, instead of Queries, and the report will give you a list of the top inbound search pages on your website.
Taken together with visitor data in Google Analytics, the search analytics reports can provide you with a solid understanding of what queries your website is doing well at, and how search traffic is interacting with your website.
Setting Up Search Console
If you are brand new to search console and need help figuring out how to connect it to your website, check out Elise’s video below:
