October 8

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Use Search Console to fill in the Analytics Gaps

By Jason Khoo

October 8, 2020


Transcript

Hi, guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk and Tea. 

Today's conversation, using search console to fill the analytics gaps. This is important because when it comes to reporting, it is oftentimes difficult to understand what keywords are bringing traffic to your website. Using a combination of search console analytics can help you bridge that gap. Before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. Today, we have a Pu'Er Tea, which has been on the show probably now the most. This is now officially, probably the tea that's been on here the most, and it deserves to be because I drink this almost every single day. So naturally, it should be on the show. Again, it's a Pu'Er Tea, that is a fermented tea. It has a very dark look color when it comes out, very similar to black coffee. But like I always say, it does not taste like black coffee, but it probably has the same general kick of a black coffee in relation to other teas.

So let's go ahead and get brewing, get chatting. The reason why I want to have this conversation is because of one of the impediments in SEO is that back in the early 2000s, so I'm saying like, 08 to 10, I always forget the year, but Google removed the ability on analytics to go see what keywords would bring traffic to your website. This was relatively a large boom to a lot of marketing companies, because they use that data to understand what keywords bringing traffic to them. Nowadays, when you're doing SEO, when you go into analytics, it'll just say keyword not provided when you're trying to see what keywords brought traffic. That can cause problems because if you're doing SEO or whatever, you want to be able to see what is bringing traffic to your site.

So what we have done, in our firm, to bridge that gap is we use a combination of search console analytics. Analytics will tell you, down to a granular number, one or two, how many people are coming to your website, how many entered, how many people go to this page. That's great. Search console, on the other hand, is a little bit less accurate, but it gives you different kinds of data. Search console will tell you how many times your search results or pages have been seen in Google Search, how many impressions you've got and how many clicks. What you can do though, and here's the big difference with search console analytics, search console will tell you how many ... not how many, sorry, what keywords people typed in to see your page.

That's where you can combine the two. Search console will tell you the keywords that people type to see certain pages on your site, in the search results. Analytics will tell you, down to the granular detail, how many people entered your site and where they came from. You can merge the two. What my firm does is we go into Google Analytics and we export the data on all the organic search traffic coming into the site, all the pages they visited, and so on, so forth. On search console, we'll then combine that data and export that data with analytics so we see what's all the organic search traffic coming to the site. How many people came to this page? Okay, search console, how many clicks to the page are we seeing, and then what are the keywords they're doing?

Then we do an estimate where we combine the data, just to get a general idea of the keywords that are bringing traffic. Why this is important because when you're doing SEO, sometimes you can fall in the trap of just looking at your rank tracking and relying on that for most of your SEO campaigns. But I will admit to you, even myself, that I've sometimes found a lot of the keywords they rank track for are not bringing in traffic. There are other keywords that are bringing in traffic to our site. Now, that's not to say we have the wrong targets. It's usually just an iteration thing.

For example, we thought pepperoni pizza would be our main keyword, but then we'll figure out that pizza near me is the big keyword that brings traffic. It's almost the same, but we just didn't have that in our keyword tables. So what we often find is that using the search console data with analytics gives you the closest picture you can get to understanding what keywords are bringing traffic to your site, and more importantly, what keywords will bringing traffic to what pages of your site.

That's really important because then you can start getting more strategic and be like, okay, this page ranks for this keyword and this keyword is bringing a lot of traffic. Can we expand here, can we double down, and so on and so forth. Now, again, I want to say that using search console and analytics together, it's not 100% accurate. It'll get as close as you can get to getting the data to where you need to be. So hopefully, that will help you guys in your own reporting or just understanding of how your site's performing. I'm going to go ahead and pour up my tea. If you guys found the video valuable, please like, and subscribe. I hope to see you guys again soon.

Thanks everybody.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

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