A few months ago, some poor soul recommended that people follow me on LinkedIn for marketing advice. I was instantly overwhelmed, since most of what I say on there is a complaint about the LI interface. However, I managed to churn out a suggestion for the 2 or 3 people that followed me.

Here’s my LinkedIn post, reimagined as an article. There’s no need to follow me, I haven’t said anything useful since that fateful day 6 months ago and don’t intend to start now.

If you don’t have a domain property set up with Search Console. Do it today and poke around.

Why a domain property? It’s SO HARD

Domain properties are useful because they include data for all protocol (http/https) and subdomain variations of your property. So if you happen to have some stuff going wrong, like using www and non-www simultaneously with no redirects, you’ll be able to see everything in one place.

It’s a pain, but it’s worth it. Verifying a domain property requires adding a DNS record.

What kind of stuff do you “poke?”

Depends on what you’re trying to find out. I tell people Search Console is sort of like a window into how Google sees and shares your website.

You can look at technical stuff, like crawl errors, sitemaps, HTTPS, etc.

You can look at how you’re showing up in Google Search, Google News, Google Discover – including what phrases your site is getting impressions for, clicks for, and so on.

I’d suggest starting with “Search Results” under “Performance. ” In here, you can see the queries that get impressions and clicks, you can check out the click through rate (impressions to clicks) and your average rank in Google.

Search Console in Practice

Here’s a practical example of something you can do with this info using our brand, Saint Pillow.

Daniel Jacob Romero‘s article about dreaming in 3rd person has gotten the most impressions and clicks over the last 28 days of all our articles. It’s ranked on average at the 12th position on Google, but the CTR is only 1%. Let’s see if we can find some ways to increase our rank and our CTR to drive more impressions and clicks.

According to SC, our best rank is for “seeing yourself in third person in a dream” and our best impressions come from “dreaming in third person.”

Looking at our title and description for the page, we’re not targeting either of those concepts super well. Our page title is “Third Person POV Dreams.” Since the article is a good fit for both the queries above, let’s try updating the meta to better support those terms.

• New title idea: “Dreaming in Third Person: Seeing Yourself While You Sleep”
• New meta description idea: “Do you dream in 3rd person or 1st person? Are you worried you might be a sociopath? Put your concerns to bed. Learn which POV is superior and why.”

There you have it – in a few minutes of clicking around, you can identify new opportunities for better targeting to increase your visibility and click through.