Getting started with Search Console Insights

Welcome to another Search Console training. I'm Daniel Waisberg, Search Advocate at Google. In this video, I'll talk about a quick way to get started with Search Console, using the Insights report. Search Console Insights centralizes your performance highlights and provides a high-level view of your search traffic. It shows how your content is performing, what's trending up or down, which queries are bringing visitors to your site, and more. In a separate video, I dive deeper into the Search Performance reports, which are important when you want to analyze further. There, I discuss controls, features, charts and tables, so check out the links in the description. GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE TRAINING GETTING STARTED WITH SEARCH CONSOLE INSIGHTS Before we go on to discuss what you can see in the Insights report, we need to clarify a few things to make sure we're on the same page. First, the report shows mostly traffic coming from the main Google Search tab. I'll call out one exception when I get there. Second, you get an impression every time someone sees a link to your website, and you get a click every time someone clicks that link and goes to your website. Third, a query is a word or expression that people search for in Google Search when they find you. That's all the context you need to understand the Search Console Insights report. Let's dive in. When you open Search Console, you'll find the Insights report in the navigation. You can also find a link in the video description. The only control available is the date picker, where you can choose the last seven days, 28 days or three months. If you'd like to take a look at an article or product you published recently, you should choose the last seven days. If you'd like to see your hits in the last few months, choose three months. The default is the last 28 days, as it gives you a good indication of your performance. Following that, you'll see two prominent numbers, the total Clicks and Impressions you got during the time period you chose. The little line charts, or spark lines, will also update based on your time choice, showing the clicks and impressions from that period and if they went up or down. The first card is called "Your content," and it shows information about the performance of specific pages on your site. There are three tables in this card. The first shows your Top pages, the content that received the most clicks. Then you see the "Trending up" pages, which are the ones that gained the most clicks compared to the previous period. For example, when looking at the last 28 days, the previous period would be the 28 days prior to that. Last, you'll see the "Trending down" pages, which are the ones that lost the most clicks compared to the previous period. In each of these tables, you'll find how many clicks the pages received and also the change when compared to the previous period. Green means the content is doing well, and red, not so much. If you'd like to see more examples of pages, click "View more. " If you'd like to learn more about a specific page, for example, which queries led visitors to it, from which countries or devices, you can click the page row in the table. This will take you to the Search Results Performance reports, with a feature to include only this page. I'll talk more about this report in another video. Check the links in the description. In the Queries card, you'll find the performance of different search terms that led visitors to your site. These queries are grouped into themes or clusters. Search Console tries to find common patterns in your queries to help you see the bigger picture. You'll also be able to check the Top, Trending up and Trending down groups of queries. If you click one of the table rows, you'll be taken to the Search Results Performance report, with a filter to include all the queries in this group. Clicking the filter will enable you to edit the list of queries for further analysis. If you're not sure how to use regular expressions, check the links in the description. The "Top countries" card will show you the distribution of traffic from different countries. You can also click one of the countries here to dig deeper into the performance for this specific country. The "Branded traffic" card shows the distribution of your clicks between queries that are Branded versus Non-branded. Branded queries are those that contain your brand's name, domain or products

including spelling variations and mistakes. You could use that to track the success of brand awareness efforts or identify content gaps with your loyal audience. Click the chart to apply one of the options to a performance report and analyze it further. The "Additional traffic sources" card is the exception I mentioned in the introduction. Here, in addition to seeing your Google Search traffic, you'll also be able to compare it to Discover and Google News. We'll break down Search to several of its tabs, like Video, Image and News. This can help you understand where your traffic is coming from. Click any row to get a more detailed report on each of them. Thank you for staying to the end. Hopefully, this video helps you get up and running with the Search Console Insights report. In summary, it will help you understand and monitor your content performance on Google Search, all in one place. Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Search Central YouTube channel to be the first to watch our upcoming videos. Stay tuned! GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE TRAINING The "Top countries" card will show you the distribution of traffic from different countries. No, not that type of traffic. We'll talk about the good kind in the next video.