If you’ve been getting traffic to your website for a few months, you could be sitting on an SEO goldmine.
Google Search Console (GSC) records every click and impression your web pages receive from Google Search. As a result, it has a lot of granular data about how your pages are performing, and new trends for you to capitalize on.
Most importantly, GSC will tell you what keywords to target and pages to improve. Having conducted a great deal of our own keyword research at Cerebrum, we’ve put together a guide to using GSC for you
Google Search Console is an online portal that Google provides for free to all website owners. It helps you monitor the health of your website in regards to Google Search. Particularly, it allows you to investigate how much traffic you’re getting on your website, and how much of that traffic goes to each of your pages.
As a keyword research tool, GSC provides vital data on which keywords attract the most attention. You can filter down to specific pages to see which keywords they’re attracting traffic from.
Here’s a dirty secret of the SEO industry: popular keyword tools are not 100% accurate.
Whether you use Ahrefs, Semrush, or something else, the numbers you see on their dashboards don’t always reflect reality.
Oftentimes, you’ll find that Google Search Console (GSC) shows more traffic coming to your website than any other tool does. Plus, GSC will show you data on low-volume keywords that keyword tools won’t cover.
Without a doubt, this is because GSC supplies direct search data from Google while the other tools are merely scraping and providing educated estimates. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better source!
Let’s be clear about what GSC can and can’t do.
GSC can:
But GSC cannot:
Basically, GSC allows you to explore opportunities in the niches that you already cover. That’s mostly a good thing. Building topical authority can take a long time; expanding your strategy to an entirely new niche can be costly. GSC provides you with opportunities for quick wins.
Discovering new keywords is great, but it’s pointless if you don’t enter with a game plan.
Before you start searching for keywords and selecting which ones to target, let’s develop some criteria.
Here are some guidelines that we like to follow when we do keyword research at Cerebrum.
First things first, log into GSC and connect your website if you haven’t done so already.
Once you’re in, you can analyze your keyword performance in the “Performance” section. What an intuitive name!
Here you’ll find all the data you need regarding:
The first thing you want to do is look at your graph as a whole, are there any interesting fluctuations? You’ll probably notice that your traffic is a bit cyclical, with Sundays often being the days with the lowest traffic for business websites.
As you’ll see, you can analyze your traffic based on Queries, Clicks, Countries, Devices, Search Appearance, and Dates.
Queries: will tell you the top keywords earning traffic to your website. Sorted by clicks, you can also sort by impressions to get a better sense of the search volume for each keyword.
Pages: will show you how many clicks each page gets, aggregated across all keywords. Impressions in this case approximate how many searches are being made for those keywords.
Countries: of course, will tell you which countries your articles perform the best in. This can be useful if you’re figuring out whether to translate your pages.
Devices: these don’t really illustrate much in terms of keyword research, but it can be helpful to know which devices your visitors are using to help optimize your site.
Search appearance: Search appearance lets you know which (if any) of Google’s various snippets you appear on, and for which keywords and pages.
Here is a full list of places on Google Search where your website might appear:
Dates: Finally, you can filter for keywords based on the date. This can be useful for figuring out the breakdown of which articles contributed to a peak in traffic.
Scrolling through your keyword data can be an enlightening experience, but as we mentioned earlier, you have to go in with a plan.
Simply sorting the keywords by clicks or impressions won’t do much. Instead, let’s go through the process of identifying keyword opportunities that are actually valuable to you.
To find the low-hanging fruit, you should gather all the queries with an average rank between 5 and 10.
You can find this by clicking the filter button on the right-hand side of the table.
Then, you can filter for positions greater than 5 (unfortunately, you can’t also set it to less than 10 at the same time).
Setting this filter will produce a bunch of keywords that you rank for already, but just aren’t getting enough clicks from for some reason. Sort by impressions and select the highest-ranked ones with sufficient search intent.
Now, what do you do with this selection?
As we indicated earlier, not every keyword is worth targeting. Right now, you’re going to use the criteria we listed earlier to determine which keywords are worth it.
You’re going to:
Once you find the keywords that you think are worth it, you should cross-reference them with your existing blog posts.
A quick way to do it is using AI, just copy-paste the keywords you want to target and the titles of your current blog posts. Ask the AI to compare the two to see where the overlap lies.
Among the keywords with no overlap, try to figure out how many impressions you’re getting since this is a good proxy for traffic.
If the impressions are low – relative to the traffic you’re currently getting – then it might make more sense to target that keyword within one of your existing articles, for instance, by adding a section.
On the other hand, if the impressions are high, then it could be well worth writing a new article on the subject.
After you choose which articles need to be updated, you have a decision to make. You can either write the updates yourself or outsource it to an experienced team.
At Cerebrum, we’ve productized the entire content update process with our SEO content upgrades.
In fact, we’ll even look into your GSC performance and identify which articles need updating for you.
The beautiful thing about content upgrades is that they’re the fastest way to increase your traffic. If your article ranks in the top 10 as these keywords do, then Google is constantly crawling your pages, and when you update your content based on a well-targeted strategy informed by in-depth keyword research, it’s almost inevitable that your content ranks higher.
Now, sometimes you have way too many queries to sift through, and to get to the juicy keywords quicker, you’ll need to use some advanced filtering techniques.
Regex expressions are the best way to do that. Basically, these allow you to filter for queries that follow a particular pattern. For instance, questions.
To filter for Regex patterns in GSC, simply click to create a new filter and then adjust the dropdown on the left to Custom (regex)
Make sure to select “Matches regex” on the right if you want to match all of the Regex patterns provided. If you want to exclude them, you could also set it to “Does not match”.
Here is a list of useful Regex queries you can steal, and an explanation of what they’re useful for:
1. Questions
(?i)^(who|what|where|when|why|how)
These allow you to filter for basic questions and are very useful for enriching your articles as they reveal questions your target audience is interested in.
2. Alternatives
(?i)(vs|versus|compare|comparison|review|reviews|alternative|alternatives|or)
As we mentioned before, this covers many of the money keywords that you need to target
3. Pricing
(?i)(price|cost|how much)
Evidently, these heavily indicate buying intent and can help you learn more about what your customers are looking for.
4. Product-specific
(?i)(product name|service name)
Again, if you discuss one of your competitors in your articles, you might rank for terms relevant to their brand. In that case, it’s best to write in more detail about the topic to increase your rank.
Keep in mind that GSC uses the RE2 pattern for REGEX here.
If you don’t decide to write a brand-new article, at the very least put your target keywords in a subheading as you expand on an existing one. That will help Google find this keyword quicker as they parse through the article.
One thing that you should be wary of is that not all keywords are worth targeting. When you find a Regex keyword with a good amount of impressions but no clicks, cross-reference the keyword with another keyword tool, like Ahrefs, to see how competitive the sites that you’re trying to rank against are.
We mentioned that positions 5-10 are the best candidates for updates, but 11-20 work too (again, so long as the keyword isn’t too competitive).
Of course, your standards here should be more stringent. Make sure that you’re trying to rank for money keywords in this range.
If you want an on-demand service that’s tailored specifically to helping you update your articles, then look no further than our Content Upgrade service. We can help you research, plan, and execute a Content Upgrade strategy that helps you bring in traffic far quicker than traditional SEO strategies.
