What about Google Analytics and? GBP Insightsand third parties Rank tracker? Each of these has its place in the world and can be useful. You can use them and they can be helpful. But if you had to choose ONE way to measure your performance in local search results, a place to monitor progress, a tool to help you Troubleshooting, Google Search Console is your best (or least bad) choice. In my experience it is the most stable buoy to hold on to.
Whether you do your own local SEO, are part of a team working on it, or are an SEO professional who needs to do it put out the occasional fireHere’s why I say Google Search Console (“GSC”) is uniquely useful for helping you figure things out, and why digging through its data is a particularly worthwhile use of your time:
1. GSC shows you your search engine visibility (“impressions”) and not just the traffic resulting from that visibility. You can see your impressions and clicks in the Performance section in the left sidebar. That’s where all the action is and I recommend you go there whenever you want to know pretty much everything about your local search visibility.
In contrast, Google Analytics only shows you the clicks you get, not how many eyeballs you get (unless you Synchronize GA and GSC). It’s common to have a page on your website that receives little or no traffic but is ranking quite well. This type of site is not a lost cause and could work well with a little more work or time. Having no impressions and no clicks are two different problems, and you don’t want to leave a page thinking you have both problems when in reality you only have one problem (and may be able to fix that soon too). Don’t tear up your watermelon patch because it’s already been 40 days and you still don’t have a watermelon the size of a watermelon. You may need to give it more nutrients, and you definitely need to give it more time.
2. It’s easy to focus on certain pages that may be progressing slower and may need work. Your website has no rank in the organic results for this or that concept; Individual sites do this. In the Google Maps results, too, certain pages are usually responsible for your ranking for this or that term in the local pack of three. Probably a good 90% of the site optimization and content creation work you’ll ever do will be done on one page at a time, rather than on elements that impact the entire site (e.g. footer links, main navigation, XML sitemap , robots.txt etc.). possibly redirects etc.). Focused data allows you to focus your work. Look at the Pages tab (under Performance).
3. You can see what happened on specific days and you can compare time ranges. In the Performance section, you can see exactly what happened to specific pages and for specific search terms, around the time calls dried up two months ago and around the time business picked up last Tuesday. Search Console shows you the “when” and allows you to understand the “what.”
4. You can also measure the visibility of your Google business profile (local 3-pack). UTM tracking links appear in Search Console, making this easy to do Emphasize the visibility of your Google business profile and traffic from your organic visibility and traffic. You want to know exactly where your visibility gaps are. Therefore, I recommend you create a tracking link and use it as the landing page URL Your Google Business profile. Check out Claire Carlile’s excellent guide to creating tracking links for GBP., along with this practical template to create them.
5. The filters. You can determine a TONE by looking at different sections of your “Query” and “Page” data using filters. For example, you can see all the pages that rank for search terms that contain the word “near me.” You can see how many people searched for your business by name instead of typing in broader search terms. If you suspect you’ve been affected by an algorithm update or the arrival of a new competitor on the map, you can filter out all impressions and clicks from your GBP page(s) and then do a similar approach for organic search. You can see how all your “Service” pages, “Product” pages, “City” pages or blog posts work as a group. The filters are simple but incredibly powerful. I suggest you spend a few minutes playing around with them.
6. Secrets and Surprises: GSC can tell you what you didn’t want to know. Under “Queries” (under “Performance”) you can see how you’re doing on terms you didn’t even know you were ranking for, i.e. terms you didn’t know you would rank for want to rank for, and terms you didn’t think anyone would search for. In most third-party rank trackers and similar tools, you can only see your rankings for terms that you specify and let the tracker do the tracking. Search Console makes it easy to see what’s cooking, even when you’re not in the kitchen.
8. Few of your competitors use GSC. In an extremely competitive market where half of business owners need to know a thing or two about SEO to get nothing out of it total Flanked by the average agency, perhaps half of business owners have heard of Search Console. Half of this group has it installed on their websites, half of these people have personal access to it, and half of this People keep coming in to check out the issues that Google sends those annoying notification emails about. Most of these 6% (approximately) of business owners don’t even visit the Performance section of Search Console, let alone know what to do with the information displayed there. So by my rough calculation, if you ever search for answers in GSC, your SEO antennas are in the top 1%.
9. GSC does not change often or dramatically. Sure, there are some bugs and Google tinkers with them from time to time. However, there isn’t the same frequency of facelifts and redesigns as other Google products.
11. It’s free.
Search Console is anything but perfect. You will only see up to 16 months of data. It gets bed bugs. Some of the data may be unreliable. You can always supplement your data and understanding with what you see in other tools, and perhaps you should. However, if you need to select ONE location to see how you perform in local search – both organically and on cards – it’s your least bad choice. It shows you the big picture, allows you to address very specific questions or concerns, and is quick and easy for you and others to navigate once you have the necessary knowledge. The Search Console information has been extremely useful to my clients and to me, as well as to you. Dig right in.
What data did you find most helpful in Search Console? Did you ever gain insights there that saved your bacon? Is there something you didn’t understand or couldn’t figure out in Search Console? Leave a comment!
