Did you know the best way to increase your organic search ranking is with Google Search Console? Organic search is a valuable tool in the marketing mix and paid search is getting more challenging. Putting time into strengthening your ranking could be your best investment yet.

Three Reasons to Focus on Organic Search:

  1. It’s free. Brand impressions link to your website content and Google currently has 86.86% of the search engine market (Statista).
  2. High intent. Get in front of a targeted audience of people searching for answers and researching products and services.
  3. Builds credibility. When you search Google, you look at the first few results. If your brand develops a higher ranking, you build trust with your audience,

 

This just scratches the surface on what we refer to as low hanging fruit; opportunities ripe for the picking that drive free, quality traffic to your site.

Good SEO-optimized, keyword-rich content like answering searchers questions drives free, high-value traffic. That high-intent traffic is more likely to convert, and a great way to improve your SEO and organic search is with Google Search Console. 

 

Tip: Use Google Search Console to determine your rank position. It can show you the keywords your website is getting, or not getting, impressions on. This is valuable data that you can target and refine your content towards your potential audiences’ interests. 

Organic Search is becoming more necessary to reach your ideal customers online, as targeting in paid online advertising is only going to get harder. 

Google is shifting away from advertising targeting 3rd party cookies. Learn more about this here. 

Regardless of if you have applied meta titles and descriptions (minimums for good SEO), Google will crawl your website. 

It seems simple, but gaining a strong ranking (position 1-10 landing you on page one) will take time and can be challenging. That’s where Google Search Console comes in to help. 

The major search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo) account for 70.6% of all website traffic (SparkToro)

What is Google Search Console?

It is a free webmaster tool that every digital marketer should be tapping into. Google Search Console provides you with branded and non-branded search keywords, position in search and visibility on what keywords are not converting for you.  

 

Five Reasons to Use Google Search Console to Drive Organic Search

As you publish website content, you want to be sure your content is indexed properly by Google. Use Google Search Console to:

1. Request your page/site gets indexed to verify it.

2. Validate that the page has no errors, is mobile-friendly with no broken links.

3. Determine what terms people are searching for that lead to impressions on your website ex. clicks vs. no clicks.

4. Determine what terms have high impressions, but aren’t leading to your website.

5. Your click-through-rate (CTR) and Position in search also gives you a sense of how aligned your content is to what’s being searched.

Capitalize on these observations and create strong SEO-friendly content by reviewing and applying these insights on a monthly basis.

For instance, within your website, you can prioritize and optimize the terms you are getting impressions on, but no clicks. Once optimized, those terms will get a lift in organic CTR so more people will see your site more often. 

Tip: Always ensure your content is optimized with keywords to improve your Organic Search Results.  

How to Audit Your Google Search Console Results to Improve Organic Search

When we talk with marketers one of the first questions we ask is ‘Are you using Google Analytics?’ and ‘Are you using Google Search Console?’ Both are free and essential to understanding what you have already accomplished in terms of visibility, but like other digital channels, you need to see how they are working for you.

First, register your site to Google Search Console and you may need to work with your website developer to get the GSC tag added. 

Here’s how you can perform an audit:

What Query Terms (Keywords) Are You Getting Clicks On?

First, an impression means your page title and description appeared on the search result screen. As a result of those impressions, how many clicks did you achieve? Position one in organic is the first spot on the first page

  1. Click on performance, it will default to the last three months. 
  2. You will see the Query in relation to Clicks, Volume of Search Impression 
  3. Check the CTR and Position at the top 
  4. Sort by each one to stack rank top vs. bottom performance 

What are your Non-Branded Organic Search Terms?

Filter out your brand name to look at your non-branded terms. 

  • Compare the last three months to the previous three months, or I go even bigger; this is your macro trend.
  • What terms are you in position 1-10 (non-branded terms)?
  • Sort on the clicks to stack rank clicks to see top organic keywords.
  • Sort on impressions to see what keyword trends are popular with your audience and which ones get clicks and which ones do not – those could be good words to optimize further on your pages.
  • Click on CTR (Click Through Rate) – a good CTR in most cases is 3%+
  • Sort on Position to look for single-digit results which are your top-ranked keywords
  • Click over to Pages to do the same – understand which pages are ranking

 

Next Step: Optimize Keywords

Based on your audit you can now optimize your keywords for non-branded terms. This will help you get a short-term boost in your organic search performance.

Take the time to prioritize key pages on your website by optimizing the page content and site metadata for category keywords or buying intent keywords.  

Today’s busy marketers often do not prioritize Search if it’s already delivering results. But by just applying a little bit more love to your content you reach a more qualified audience through organic search.  

Interested in digging in deeper? Please take a look at how deep you can get into SEO with this article from Brian Dean at Backlino.

 

Ready to add Google Search Console and SEO strategy to your Go-to-Market plan? From platform coaching to implementation, Snapdragon Marketing and help get your ranking trending up. Schedule a free consult with Coach Kelly today.

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