Unlock Organic Search Data with Google Search Console

For many overburdened communications teams and marketers, understanding website analytics data is a task that always on the to-do list but rarely gets the attention it deserves.

You know that some proportion of the visitors coming to your website are coming from "organic search" (that means clicks to your website from search result pages that are not from paid search advertising), but wouldn't it be great if you could see what Google searches are displaying pages from your website? And which placements in search results are resulting in clicks through to your website?

If you've asked those questions, a free tool called Google Search Console has answers for you. And the good news is that it's A) simple to set up, and B) FREE

Google Search Console is a powerful, free tool that will help you understand how your website is performing in organic search results. This article covers how to connect your website to Google Search Console, and explains a couple of quick wins you can deliver for your communications team once you have visibility into your website's organic search data.

Before we jump into setting up Google Search Console, here's a preview of the data you'll get access to

What data does Search Console provide?

The website performance tab in Google Search Console will be your starting point, and contains a wealth of valuable information that will have you uncovering new insights about your website right away.

Four basic metrics are displayed: total clicks, total impressions, average click-through rate, and average position. You can click each of these to toggle them on and off on the graph. Note that when the metric is displayed on the graph, a column is also added on the table below that displays that metric for each row.

• Total Clicks is how many times users clicked through to your website from Google search results.

• Total Impressions is the number of times users saw a link to your website in Google search results.

• Average Click-Through Rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click through to your website.

• Average Position is the average numerical position that pages from your site appeared in the search results, with “1” being the first website link in the search results.

All of the data in the graph and the table below can be filtered by query, page, and date range. So much to explore!

Connecting Google Search Console

As usual, the details here depend a little on own technical setup. Here are the basic steps:

• Go to https://search.google.com/search-console and create an account. Pro-tip: if you already have Google Analytics tracking code installed on your website, sign up for Google Search Console using a Google account that also has access to the Google Analytics property.

• Once you have an account, the next step is to add a "website property". This website property will then be used to gather organic search data, so it's important to understand this step! At the time of writing, there are two choices: a "domain" property or a "URL-Prefix" property. Let's look at these two options in a bit more detail:

Domain Property

A domain property will cover all subdomains associated with a domain, and all protocols used to access the domain. If your website domain is example.com, setting it up as a domain property would mean that organic search traffic to subdomains like blog.example.com or donate.example.com would also be included. Setting the website property up to cover the whole domain also catches pages that are accessed via the http AND https protocols. Hopefully you're entire website forces visitors to use the secure https protocol by now, but in case you don't, setting a domain property will make sure all those visits are captured.

URL-Prefix Property

A Search Console URL-Prefix property will only include results that match the URL exactly as it appears in your browser bar. This means it is sensitive to the following differences:

• http://example.com is different to https://example.com

• https://www.example.com is different to https://example.com

• https://example.com is different to https://example.com/

Being able to provide this level of specificity can be helpful if you want to track these different segments of traffic separately, but that does require adding multiple separate URL-Prefix properties.

WAIT! This is confusing! Which one should I use?

If you have a simple website and are just getting started with exploring Google Search Console, I'd recommend setting up the Domain Property.

Verify Site Ownership

Once you've entered your domain or URL-prefix property information, Search Console will prompt you to verify that you own the domain and website. If you're following the advice above and using a Domain Property, this means adding a record to the Domain Name System (DNS) records for your domain which allows Search Console to verify that you own and control the domain. (If you choose the URL-Prefix Property option, there are some other paths to verification that are explained here.)

If you don't have access to edit your domain's DNS records (or don't feel comfortable or confident doing so), this is the point in the process where you may need a few minutes of help from the person who set up your website, or another friendly digital/web professional. You'll need to identify where your domain is registered (common providers include GoDaddy, Namecheap, register.com), log in to your account that provider's website, navigate to the section where you can edit the DNS records, and follow the instructions provided by Google Search Console to add a new TXT record to your domain's DNS. Search Console provides a handy "email these instructions to your web developer" option if you need to tag someone else in to complete this step.

Once the DNS record is added, you can click the final "Verify" button in Google Search Console. It may not be able to complete the verification right away, and that's fine. DNS records can take a while to propagate, so just come back after an hour or two and try again if verification doesn't complete immediately.

Once the property is verified, Google Search Console will take a few days to start populating with data. Sit tight for 2-3 days and then come back and start digging into the Performance tab to explore your organic search insights!

Next Steps

This article is just a starting point: there's a lot more to dig into in Search Console that can help inform your communications team's digital strategy. Search Console is a powerful tool for monitoring website performance, identifying opportunities to improve search engine optimization (SEO), track SEO-focused metrics, and drill down into detailed indicators like branded search visibility and more.