How to Track Rich Features with Google Search Console

Are you optimizing your site with Schema.org Structured Data? Do you want to be able to track the impacts of earning a Rich Feature in Search? In this video, I’ll show you how to leverage Google Search Console to track the results of your Rich Features.

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s up and welcome to this tutorial on leveraging Search Console to track the impact of our SERP features that we’ve earned by either earning a featured snippet or by leveraging structured data and specifically schema markup in order to earn something like an FAQ, products, review, videos and more.

Search Console is a tool that used to be known as Google Webmaster. Obviously it’s changed quite a bit over the years. This is the new and improved version, which was released not too long ago. And with it, we have some pretty cool new features.

When you log into Search Console, you need to have your site verified. That’s the first step. In order to do that, you need to add your URL up in the top here. And then Google is going to ask you to verify it through a number of different ways through your Google analytics account, through tag manager, through a meta tag. There’s a bunch of different ways to do that, and I’ll create a link here in this video so you can check that out to make sure that you have your site verified.

Resource: Verify your site in Search Console.

Once it’s verified, it’s going to be able to share with you how your site and your site links are performing in the search results. It’s going to tell you how many impressions you have, how many clicks you have, the overall click-through rate of your site. But today we’re talking specifically about how do we track the impact of our search results when it comes to earning featured snippets or other rich results.

Now, if you look at the left hand sidebar, you’re going to see a number of different things. Results right here. Performance is going to show you your search results or Google discovery, which has to do within the mobile application of Google. We also can see our indexing. And then right below that we see enhancements.

Enhancements is where you’re going to find things like core web vitals, which is part of the new algorithm, which Google will be releasing and rolling out sometime in 2021. It’s going to tell you how your site’s performing on mobile. It’s going to give you an update on AMP if you’re leveraging AMP for your content, but then it’s also going to show you your rich features. So right here, we’ve got FAQ’s, logo, site link search box, videos. What we can do is begin to drill down into some of these features to see how it’s impacting specific pages overall, click-through rate or impressions.

Now, if I click on the videos here. What it’s going to show is right now we have no errors. We have no warnings. And then we have four pages that are valid. It’s going to tell me when the page was last detected, what it is, the item itself that’s being shown. So this case would be the video, and then the URL that it’s showing on.

But it doesn’t give me any information on how this page is performing. It’s not telling me anything on the impressions or the clicks. So in order to see that, we actually need to go over to performance. Now performance, this is going to show how your page is performing in Search. The total amount of impressions, the clicks, your overall click-through-rate, your average position, things like that.

Now right below, we can actually drill down through here. It’s going to usually sort it by clicks, but it’ll tell us the top queries that we’re getting to our site. It’s going to tell us the pages, the countries, the devices. And right here, it’ll show what’s called Search Appearance. If we click on Search Appearance, it will begin to pull some data from the enhancement section. We have things like AMP pages, web light results, which has to do with mobile. And then we have the videos. What we’d want to do is click into this, and now you can see a trend over time. Now there’s a couple of things you can do with this data. Looking at it right here, we’re only looking at pages with videos so we want to make sure that we’re comparing it against a control group.

Our pages with video typically are our blog pages because we do publish our videos on our blog. And so we could take non-video blogs and see what the difference is between those. So create control groups and track the different impressions in the clicks. You can even export all of this data, and you can export the URLs and then create two different segments and analytics and run a test to see the impact of organic traffic to those pages as well.

There’s a lot that you can do with this data. This is just one result, and these are only for videos because that’s something that we’re targeting right now for our site, but we’ve got clients that we can track reviews. Are we getting clicks because we have these here, or are we getting more clicks than pages that don’t have these search features?

As you can see up here, Search Appearance is up here in the filter, and we can take this filter off and see what our oppression is like overall, without those. Now again, we’re looking at all pages on our site so this wouldn’t be an actual A/B test to know the difference because you can see it looks like we had an increase in clicks overall over the last few months.

But you can start to get some data and understanding to see which pages are earning those rich positions. And then figure out how can you optimize with them or for them. The most important thing is that we can leverage this tool. We can leverage these filters to see which pages are earning rich features and then understanding are they having a positive impact on our clicks and our impressions.