New insights now available in Google Search Console
Google is considered the king of all search engines! It’s not hard to see why. Not only does the platform attract approximately 5.6 billion searches per day, but it constantly develops new services and features for businesses and users to benefit from. Google Search Console Insights is one of the latest examples of this, and we will reveal everything that you need to know about it below.
What is Google Search Console (GSC)?
Before we can tell you more about GSC Insights, we first need to explain what Google Search Console is. This is a free service that Google provides to assist you in monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting the presence of your website in the Google search results.
You don’t need to sign up for Google Search Console in order to be featured within the Google search results. However, you do need to sign up to it to access all its juicy goodies. It’s a very important platform that gives you the ability to better understand your site’s search traffic (where they’re coming from, what search terms they’re using etc), troubleshooting and fixing issues with your site, along with other metrics.
Some of the different things you can do via Google Search Console include:
- Troubleshoot problems for mobile usability, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), and other search features;
- Discover which websites are linking to yours (and to which pages they are linking);
- Receive alerts when Google encounters issues like spam or indexing;
- View Google search traffic data for your website, including how often searchers click through certain queries or how often your website is featured in Google search;
- Fix indexing issues and request re-indexing of updated or new content;
- Confirm that Google is able to locate your website and coral it properly.
What is Google Search Console insights?
Google Search Console insights is a new experience that has been designed with publishers and content creators in mind, giving them the ability to get a deeper understanding of how audiences find their website’s content and what sort of content performs best.
You will be able to answer the following questions (and more):
- What pieces of content perform the best?
- How are new pieces of content performing?
- Which articles or other sites refer people to your content and your website?
- Prior to visiting your content, what did people search for on Google?
- How do people find your content across the internet?
You can also use GSC insights to do a deep dive of your site’s current performance with a view to preparing (or updating) your site to be compliant with Google’s ‘page experience’ algorithm.
When did the new GSC insights roll out?
Google has only just launched the full version of GSC Insights. It has been available since August 2020 but was only in beta testing then and you had to be invited in order to use it. Aside from availability, there have not been any announced changes between the version that was released last year and this month, although it is reasonable to expect tweaks both now and in the future.
Make sure you “associate” your GSC with your Google Analytics
In order to maximise the full potential of this new future, one thing you will need to do is associate your GSC with your Google Analytics. Associating both accounts is imperative because it enables you to establish a direct channel of communication with Google so that you can get all of the data you need about your website.
So, how do you associate your Google Search Console with Google Analytics?
- Create and verify the URL prefix property - either use your Google Tag Manager or upload an HTML file on your site
- Head to Admin, Property, and the Property Settings, and select the ‘Adjust Search Console’ button
- On the next page, click on Add, and then choose the newly created GSC property
Follow these three simple steps and your GSC should be associated with your Google Analytics.
Of course, this may be a little technical for some. If that’s the case, you should simply ask your service provider to ensure your GSC and your Analytics are associated.
The top 6 features and benefits of new insights in GSC
There are a lot of great features that you are going to be able to make the most of with the new insights in GSC. Let’s take a look at them in further detail.
1. Trending content insights
You will be able to learn about what sort of content is trending for your site (assuming your site has sufficient traffic to analyse this). This will enable you to focus your content efforts on the best-performing content types.
2. Content queries
Find out about the exact queries people are searching for in order to find your content (the keywords and phrases they are using). This enables you to effectively satisfy the intent of the searcher.
3. High-traffic results
You will also be able to determine what sort of search queries and types of content are getting the most traffic for your content.
4. Recent content performance
Whenever launching a new content campaign (for example, a new post on your blog), it is important to track its performance so that you can learn what you’ve gotten right and where changes may need to be. Google Search Console insights enable you to do this. After all, trends are changing all of the time, so it is not only important to know about your all-time top-performing content, but how recent pieces are performing.
5. All-time content performance
Moving on from point #4, you will be able to learn about your best performing content of all time.
6. Make intelligent decisions with a snapshot of your business’ content strategy
The main reason to consider using Google Search Console insights is that you are going to benefit from insights that you can use to make more intelligent decisions and drive your business forward. After all, you are never going to be able to enhance your content strategy if you do not have a thorough understanding of how it is performing in the first instance. That is exactly what GSC insights can provide you with.
Summary
So, there you have it. The new Google Search Console insights platform!
We hope that this has helped you to get a better understanding of the platform and how it can help you to take your content marketing strategy to new heights. If you have any further questions about effective marketing on Google, please get in touch.
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