How To Increase CTR and Rank Using Search Console

While SEO can get very complicated, some of the simple steps deliver the biggest impact. In this weeks video, I’ll share how to leverage Search Console to make gains in both your rank and CTR. The best part, is that doesn’t take a lot of time and delivers great ROI!

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s up and welcome to Hack My Growth. Today, we’re going to do a quick video on how we can leverage Google Search Console to optimize our pages for better click through rates and more engagement. All right, let’s go. Are you looking to grow your business but you’re not sure where to start? That’s where we come in. Hey, thanks for checking out this video. If this is your first time watching or maybe you’ve been watching a while and you have not yet become a subscriber, please do so now. We would love to have you join our community. We create new content each and every week to help you get more out of your online marketing initiatives.

So like I said, today, we’re going to be talking about Search Console, and more specifically how we can use it to get better click-through-rates in the search results, improve our ranks, and really just improve the overall search visibility of a page. Now, if you aren’t using Google Search Console, I highly recommend it. It used to be called Webmaster Tools, but this can sync and connect with your Google Analytics account and it can allow you to see exactly how your site is performing in search. A lot of the data here is for data from real users typing in real search queries and it can give you some really powerful analytics, but also lets you know how your site is performing in search. So once you’ve set up your site here, we will go ahead and go to the site.

All right, so this is what it looks like once you’ve logged into Google Search Console. You’ll need to connect to your domain. You can connect it through a variety of different ways, so follow the onscreen instructions, it’ll help you out here. So as you can see, there’s a number of things going on here. The overview is going to show you your performance in search. It’s going to show you your index coverage. It’s going to show you what kind of enhancements you have as well. Mobile, AMP pages, breadcrumbs, any other kind of schema. They’re starting to pull in FAQ schema and a couple of other things as well, which we talked about those rich cards in a past video, if you want to learn more about those, I highly recommend you check that out.

Today, we’re talking specifically about how we can improve our performance in the search results. The performance report, and specifically the search one, is going to give us that information. When you click in here, you’re going to see a number of different metrics. At the top right highlight is going to be clicks and impressions. You can also see your overall click-through-rate, your average position, all of these things. Right now we’re looking at web. You can also adjust this up until 16 months. You can also do custom time frames as well. This has really grown over the year, so it gives you a lot more data. You can even compare stuff not totally in real time, but in pretty good, 12 hour periods.

Underneath, you can filter down through queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance, et cetera. What we like to do is understand the pages that we’re trying to grow and the pages that we want to have a better click-through-rate and more visibility on. So what you would do here is click down on pages. What this is going to show you is the pages you have clicks on and the impressions. For instance, let’s say we have this blog here, 64,900 impressions, 101,318 clicks. We click on here. It’s going to tell us we have an average click through rate of 2%, average position of 43. And now the average position is aggregating all the terms that it’s ranking for and what’s the average position of all those terms together.

We can obviously work through that and make this higher, maybe get more visibility. Now, once you are segmented on our page, you’ll notice it’s up here in the filter. You want to look at the different terms that people have used to find that page and that’s what you’ll use queries for now. What we can do is then look at how many impressions and how many clicks we’re getting. The number of clicks, so How to Promote Direct Sales Business, How to Agree Direct Sales Business. Now this is just one example, right? How to be successful as a direct sales. This page isn’t necessarily super specifically what we’re doing, but it can drive in some leads. What we want to do is then look at direct sales marketing. This right now, for this specific term, we have a very low click-through-rate, even though we’ve got a decent average position. What we can do now is then look at this term and then look at this page that we’re targeting here, which is this one.

All right, so now we’re in the back end of our CMS and we’ve got our blog title, the URL, meta-description. This is the basic SEO elements. Now this works the same if you’re on WordPress or Squarespace, Wix, any of those other sites that allow you to edit your title metas. We go back to Search Console, remember the term we were looking at, and we saw that we’ve got some impressions but we have bad click-through-rate, in direct sales marketing.

Now, again, before we start targeting these terms, it’s probably also good to know that there’s some search volume associated with them. So we did quick keyword research, about 110 searches a month. Not a ton, but it’s enough, right? If you start to grow a lot of these different terms in a lot of terms around your core terms, you’re going to start to grow significant traffic to your site.

So this is a valuable term to us. We can still take some initiative here. If we want to increase the click-through-rate, we can start to test things like adding direct sales marketing up here to the blog title and then shifting the way that the title tags are being represented so that it’s a reflective a lot more to the keywords. Also, start to work out this meta-description and change the meta-description. Add in that term. What I like to do is make sure that we have a good list of terms before start going through and making all these major edits. If you want to start to go through them all, you can easily download them here and export them into a Google sheet. What’s nice about this is you can see them all in one place and see how they’re connected. You can also look at your position, the click through rates. You can really start to see is there anything we want to filter through and look at click-through-rates that are under 2%. So we’ll go clear.

You can do this. You can also create a filter, but I’m just going to click these boxes really quick and okay. So that’s going to leave us with all of these terms. Now you also want to filter it by impressions. Obviously, you want to start with the ones that have the highest impressions first and go down from there. Direct sales, direct sales marketing, direct selling, direct sales leads, attracting new customers. All of these are terms that we can look at and we can look to adding them not just to our titles and meta, but also moving into the content and saying, “Okay, well, maybe we need to use some of these terms more frequently through our content,” and begin to build the content that way as well. Once you’ve done this, obviously, make your updates, and then you want to feed this page back to search.

Take this page and paste it into your URL inspector here and ask Google to crawl this page again. I’m not going to do it because I haven’t made any changes. You don’t want to just send that to Google every time. Only when you make major changes, that way they can go and then validate those new changes and reposition your site. Once you do this, also, I highly recommend that you make an annotation in your Google Analytics account, which will allow you to know when those changes were made.

Now, you take a couple of pages a week, a couple pages, a couple months, you can start to really grow your traffic this way. And these are simple steps that you can take that will produce real results for your business.

If you’ve got any questions about this process and how to optimize your site and how to really leverage Search Console, let us know. We’d love to continue the conversation with you and really help you build out the rest of that process together. And until next time, Happy Marketing.