You should understand what’s bringing people in, what’s driving them away, and—most importantly—how to get them to stay and convert

So, what metrics should you actually pay attention to? And how can you leverage those insights to consistently bring in new customers?

That’s what we set out to discover in our latest Databox survey. We partnered up with Analytics That Profit, Business Builders, and other partners and surveyed 100+ companies to see if and how companies leverage their website analytics to improve their marketing and sales performance.

We also had a DBUG session where dozens of professionals gathered to discuss these survey insights. The live session featured four experts and delivered numerous insights that we will also cover. 

Here’s what we learned:

• Key Website Analytics Trends among Marketers: Insights on Usage, Satisfaction, and Impact
• Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 Benchmarks
• Success Stories: How GA4 and Search Console Improved Marketing and Sales
• 6 Tactics to Improve Future Marketing and Sales Campaigns Using GA4 and GSC
• Get the Most Out of Your Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console Data with Databox

Key Website Analytics Trends among Marketers: Insights on Usage, Satisfaction, and Impact

Let’s first start with the who – most respondents we talked to work in companies with 50 employees or fewer. It seems like small to mid-sized teams are the ones who are increasingly using analytics to compete.

We also found that 94.29% of surveyed companies are currently using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track user interactions and website performance.

For many, GA4 has become indispensable and it’s still the go-to tool for businesses that want comprehensive user insights and conversion tracking.

In addition, 93.33% of respondents use Google Search Console to gain insights into how users find their websites through online searches. With Search Console, these marketers can actively analyze how keywords and search behaviors drive visitors to their sites.

Marco Giordano, one of our DBUG experts, shared a strategy to maximize the power of these tools:

“I recommend for both data sources to use a BigQuery connector because you get much more data, especially with Search Console. Google likes to hide some of your data, and BigQuery just gives you more.”

Regular analysis is also essential for these companies. Most respondents review GA4 and Search Console data at least on a weekly basis to stay on top of website performance and understand user behavior.

Furthermore, 77.14% of respondents are using ‘Custom Events’ and ‘Conversions’ inside GA4.

This advanced feature helps them closely track specific user actions and personalize marketing activities to meet specific engagement goals.

In our DBUG session, Phil Wiseman of Analytics That Profit talked about the importance of this advanced feature, noting that while his organization finds it essential, many others have yet to catch up:

“80 percent of businesses they work with don’t have custom events or ROI measurements, which often creates baseless numbers rather than meaningful metrics.”

Phil Wiseman

Founder at Analytics That Profit

Want to get highlighted in our next report? Become a contributor now

Another key insight is that 69.52% of surveyed companies believe assigning a monetary value to conversions in GA4 has helped them measure the direct impact of online efforts on revenue.

By assigning these values, marketers can link website interactions to revenue outcomes.

Finally, we found that the average satisfaction rating for the combined capabilities of GA4 and Search Console stands at 7 out of 10.

This suggests that while these tools help with marketing and sales, they don’t quite deliver everything marketers need.

Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 Benchmarks

Our survey results are connected to the Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 Benchmark Group, which provides performance data from a broad sample of ~8,000 companies.

This benchmark data shows you how companies across different industries are performing, so you see where your own metrics stand compared to others.

In October 2024, benchmark data showed a median of 1.22K clicks across 2,920 contributors.

However, top-performing companies reached a median of 5.6K clicks, which shows how big of a difference in user engagement high-performing sites can achieve.

Conversions show an even more striking contrast. Median conversions in October stood at 232 across 5,559 contributors, but companies in the top quartile had a median of 1.71K conversions—7x higher.

If you’re using GA4 or GSC, we invite you to join our exclusive benchmark group – Google Search Console and GA4 Performance Benchmarks.

Once you join, you’ll be able to anonymously compare your website’s performance against thousands of other companies—at no cost.

Simply connect your account to the group (it’s 100% anonymous) and start getting insights that can help you optimize your strategy.

Not using these specific tools? You can still explore our Benchmark Groups tool and find cohorts that match your industry and goals.

Success Stories: How GA4 and Search Console Improved Marketing and Sales

GA4 and Search Console don’t just provide data – they drive strategy.

Here’s how top brands are turning these insights into measurable wins:

• Leveraging Cornerstone Content for Traffic Fluctuations
• Using Keyword Insights to Optimize Blog Content
• Optimizing Landing Pages with GA4 Conversion Tracking
• Fine-Tuning Landing Pages to Match Search Intent
• Using GA4’s Advanced AI Metrics to Predict Who Might Make a Purchase
• Tracking KPIs to Get Actionable Insights with GA4 and Google Search Console
• Enhancing Content Strategy with GA4 and Search Console Integration

Leveraging Cornerstone Content for Traffic Fluctuations

Cornerstone content is the high-value pages on your site—product pages, key service guides, and long-form articles—that directly drive customer conversions and revenue.

Instead of chasing every traffic fluctuation, focusing on cornerstone content helps brands zero in on what truly impacts the bottom line.

Matt Edens of Knowmad Digital Marketing explains how they use cornerstone content to “avoid reactionary responses to shifting traffic trends. With GA4 and GSC integrated through Screaming Frog, we monitor the performance of high-value URLs that drive commercial and transactional traffic, ensuring our efforts are tied to client business goals.”

“For instance, following Google’s March 2024 Core & Spam Updates, a waterproofing client in North Carolina experienced a 40% drop in new users quarter-over-quarter. By analyzing cornerstone content, we found that while overall traffic decreased, impressions and clicks to key commercial pages had actually doubled.

This insight reassured our client that high-value traffic remained strong, even as informational page traffic dropped. This approach underscores our shift away from prioritizing high-volume informational content and toward content that builds topical authority and directly engages target audiences.”

Using Keyword Insights to Optimize Blog Content

Google Search Console (GSC) provides insights into which keywords are leading people to your site, so you can get a direct view into what topics and terms are resonating with your audience.

You can then combine this data with tools like Semrush to find keyword gaps, new content opportunities, and make tweaks to existing blogs.

While this process often involves some trial and error, markers use it to refine their content based on real search data.

Adam Bockler of ONEFIRE explained how they use GSC to “track keywords people are searching to find our clients’ sites. Then I’ll use that in combination with Semrush to improve a blog post using that information. But it’s a bit of a guessing game, if I’m being honest.”

For Sonika Mehta of Zonka Feedback, integrating GA4 with GSC added another layer of insight.

They examined keyword-driven traffic and behavioral data together to find high-performing keywords they can direct to surveys and feedback tools, which led to a 40% increase in website visits.

Here’s what they shared:

“Integrating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with Google Search Console has greatly enhanced Zonka Feedback’s digital marketing strategy. By leveraging insights from both platforms, we identified high-performing keywords that drove organic traffic to our surveys and feedback tools. This optimization led to a 40% increase in website visits and a 25% improvement in conversion rates.”

John Reinesch of Exponential Growth also shared how, with these two tools, they are able to “get a good picture of which keywords are driving the most organic traffic and which pieces of content are driving the most conversions. We used this integration with our own website and were able to reallocate some of our marketing budget towards content creation since we were able to determine our blog was our biggest source of new leads.”

PRO TIP: Want to stay on top of your blog’s performance in real-time, without having to sift through mountains of data from GA4 and GSC? Download our free Blog Performance Tracking Dashboard where you can directly track metrics like page views, blog engagement, CTR, and more.

Optimizing Landing Pages with GA4 Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking captures key actions visitors take on your site, like filling out forms, making purchases, or clicking on contact links. These actions reveal where your high-value interactions are happening and which pages and tactics are actually driving engagement.

What’s more, GA4 conversion tracking doesn’t just show you where users are landing, but also how those pages support—or hinder—their journey toward conversion.

Marketers can find top landing pages and track conversion rates on those pages to quickly see where there’s potential to turn more visitors into leads or customers.

Marcie Lord of Digital Dynamo LLC shared their process:

“If you want to use GA4 to improve customer acquisition, you must have conversion tracking set up. This is a non-negotiable. At a minimum, you need to have conversion tags set up that track website engagement that’s most important to your business – examples include form fills, product purchases, and clicks on the phone number.

One of the obvious ways where you can use GA4 data to improve customer acquisition is by examining the top landing pages on your website, and then looking at the conversion rate on those pages for the most important tracked engagements. If the top landing pages have a very low conversion rate, examine them to make sure: – do they have a clear call to action? – is the content designed to answer user questions? – is the content easy to read, or does it make the user read too much? – do all the elements on the page work, or is functionality broken?

Adding more prominent, easy to access calls to action has been one way we’ve improved conversions for top landing pages. Instead of burying the conversion opportunity, we make it the first thing users see when they hit the page. This tactic has doubled conversion rates for many of our clients.”

Fine-Tuning Landing Pages to Match Search Intent

Disconnect between user intent and page content leads to high bounce rates and missed conversion opportunities.

You need to examine which search terms bring visitors to specific landing pages, so you can properly assess whether the page content aligns with the user’s expectations.

If users frequently bounce from a particular page, it could be a signal that the content doesn’t address what they’re looking for.

Avinash Chandra of BrandLoom Consulting shared how their team helped a client with this issue:

“For one e-commerce client, I noticed users landing from specific branded searches were bouncing right off. Why? The landing pages weren’t aligned with the searcher’s intent. We made a quick fix—optimizing the landing pages to match user expectations. The bounce rate dropped by 15%, and average session duration increased by 22%.”

PRO TIP: Are you running Google Ads and want to stay on top of your landing page performance, but struggle with their confusing reports? Here’s a Google Ads Dashboard Template where you can monitor key performance indicators like impressions, CPM, conversions, CPL, and more.

Using GA4’s Advanced AI Metrics to Predict Who Might Make a Purchase

For marketers, GA4’s advanced AI metrics provide a whole new way to connect with customers at just the right moment.

Google Analytics can now analyze past behavior to predict whether someone is likely to buy or might drop off, so companies can prioritize those who may be ready to make a decision.

Khunshan Ahmad of EvolveDash says that his team “uses this data to target the customers who are likely to purchase in the next few days based on past behavior.”

Tracking KPIs to Get Actionable Insights with GA4 and Google Search Console

Tracking KPIs with GA4 and GSC is one of the best ways to see how visitors arrive on your site and what they do once they get there.

You can get KPIs that provide a snapshot of site health and traffic sources—such as increases in direct or organic traffic—and how well specific keywords are performing.

For instance, if a blog post or landing page experiences higher-than-average traffic, you can use this data to create more content or social media promotions on similar topics.

Kameshia Ingram of BrandExtract shares their approach to leveraging KPIs:

“At our company, we like to leverage KPIs when looking at the data coming to our site with GA4 and Google Search Console. We like to see where people are coming from.

• Are we seeing an increase in direct traffic or organic traffic?
• If there is an increase in organic traffic, what keywords are driving the most clicks and what is our average position on SERPs?
• How they used the site once they get there?
• Are they filling out form submissions?
• Are they viewing a particular page more than some of our other pages?

By looking at this data and presenting it to the client or the team, we might suggest ways we can capitalize on the increase of traffic. We might suggest posting about that particular subject on socials, making sure our SEO tactics align with this strategy.”

During our DBUG session, Craig Hall said that “when you’re talking to CEOs and founders, they start to nod off when you’re talking web metrics…they want to know how it ties to revenue.”

PRO TIP: If you use HubSpot alongside Google Analytics 4, then you already know how time-consuming and tedious it can be to extract insights from the tools. But there’s an easier way to do it with our free Marketing Overview Dashboard Template (HubSpot & Google Analytics 4). Connect your most important insights from these two tools into one dashboard for actionable insights at your fingertips.

Enhancing Content Strategy with GA4 and Search Console Integration

These two tools also open up opportunities to refine your content strategy based on actual search behaviors and traffic patterns.

You can combine GA4’s page traffic insights with Search Console’s search query data, to identify keyword gaps and understand which terms have untapped potential to bring more visitors to their site.

One tactic is to focus on non-branded keywords that may have high search volume but aren’t yet driving significant traffic. These keywords often represent topics or questions that prospective customers are searching for, but where the site lacks sufficient or optimized content.

Lindsay Moura of SilverTech shared her strategy:

“One specific instance where the integration of GA4 and Google Search Console made a notable impact was when we analyzed GA4 page traffic data alongside Search Console search query data, we identified key opportunities to optimize their content strategy. We focused on non-branded search queries that were driving little to no traffic but had decent volume potential.

This led us to uncover a list of relevant keywords that were underutilized on their site. By creating new blog posts and optimizing existing content around these keywords, we significantly increased their organic search visibility and traffic to their website.”

Neil Shapiro, another expert from the DBUG session, advised that:

“You cannot analyze every single page. You must analyze groups. You should find groups based on some conditions, namely events, financial metrics, if available, and traffic, to define how to split these pages into groups.”

Neil Shapiro

Want to get highlighted in our next report? Become a contributor now

6 Tactics to Improve Future Marketing and Sales Campaigns Using GA4 and GSC

So, what’s next for our respondents?

Based on their insights, here’s a look at how they plan to continue using these two tools in the future to further optimize their campaigns:

• Using GSC and Screaming Frog to Focus on High-Impact Pages
• GA4’s Predictive Metrics to Personalize Campaigns for Higher Conversions
• Building Topic Clusters with AI-Powered Search Query Analysis
• Tracking Engagement with Scroll Depth and Google Looker Studio Dashboards
• Leveraging Search Intent Trends to Expand Multilingual Content and Social Promotion
• Using GA4 Event Tracking to Boost Customer Acquisition with Meta Ads

Using GSC and Screaming Frog to Focus on High-Impact Pages

Focusing on the pages that truly impact sales can make all the difference between hitting your business goals and chasing vanity metrics.

One tactic that can be effective is to integrate GSC with Screaming Frog to zoom in on specific, high-impact web pages rather than looking at traffic in broad strokes. You get a granular view of page performance, so you can see how changes in traffic influence client outcomes.

Marketers can avoid the common pitfalls of aggregate traffic analysis, which often leads to knee-jerk reactions or unnecessary optimizations that don’t support the objectives.

Matt Edens of Knowmad Digital Marketing is one of our respondents who talked about this approach:

“Integrating GSC with Screaming Frog has been one of the most beneficial strategies we’ve used to optimize digital marketing campaigns for sales growth. This integration allows us to stay laser-focused on work on web pages that drive impact on client sites, helping businesses achieve targeted outcomes.

Prior to implementing this strategy, traffic was viewed through more of an aggregate lens, which can lead to erroneous insights and assumptions, broad or over-implementation efforts, and/or work that simply doesn’t help the client’s business. By keeping the data specific and granular, we know when shifting traffic behavior is truly a concern and when it’s an opportunity. This has been a huge aid in achieving exceptional organic search outcomes for our clients that go beyond simple vanity metrics.”

PRO TIP: Want an easier way to track which of your pages perform well and which search queries drive traffic to your website (among other things)? You can use our free Google Search Console Queries and Page Overview Dashboard Template to get your GSC data into a single dashboard for streamlined analysis.

GA4’s Predictive Metrics to Personalize Campaigns for Higher Conversions

With tools like purchase and churn probability, you can use GA4’s predictive metrics to pinpoint which users are most likely to convert and focus on those high-value segments.

To get started, set up predictive audiences in GA4 to zero in on people likely to take actions like making a purchase or interacting with your campaign.

You can use this data to personalize messaging, offers, or content for these users. For instance, if a certain group has a high chance of buying, you could offer them a limited-time discount or a special product recommendation.

Gary Hemming of ABC Finance says that “for future campaigns, I plan to leverage GA4’s predictive metrics to tailor content based on specific audience interests. With this data, we’ll segment campaigns to create personalized follow-up interactions that strengthen engagement and drive higher conversion rates.”

Khunshan Ahmad of EvolveDash also talked about how they plan to use “revenue prediction feature of GA4 to help us get better at inventory management. This data will be useful in identifying peak customer engagement. Therefore, we will be able to increase the stock when customers are likely to increase their shopping habits. Similarly, we can either cut down on stock or create custom funnels when the activity is low.”

Building Topic Clusters with AI-Powered Search Query Analysis

Marketers can use the AI feature to analyze search queries and find the different ways people phrase similar searches. You can then build topic clusters based on this data to cover a central subject more comprehensively.

With AI-driven query analysis, marketers can see more than just individual keywords to map out the broader context of user intent.

Phil Wiseman of Analytics That Profit shares how they “use AI to analyze search queries to explore different ways people search for the same information. This approach allows you to build topic cluster easily.”

Tracking Engagement with Scroll Depth and Google Looker Studio Dashboards

To understand how users engage with blog content, you need to track more than just page views.

In GA4, scroll depth tracking offers a great way to measure how far users are scrolling through an article, so you can see which sections hold attention and where readers might drop off.

Using Google Looker Studio to visualize Google Search Console data can take this analysis further.

Looker Studio dashboards help marketers represent GSC data in a clear, visually engaging format, so it’s easier to spot trends and analyze performance across different pages and keywords.

Ruslan Konygin of Triodox explains that for “blog content analysis, you can configure GA4 to track scroll depth—analyzing how deeply (in percentage) users are scrolling through each article, how many read the article to the end, and how many click the link to the contact page. For Google Search Console, I recommend using dashboards in Google Looker Studio to better represent Search Console data.”

Leveraging Search Intent Trends to Expand Multilingual Content and Social Promotion

Are you crafting content that fits language preferences?

This is one tactic that some of our respondents plan to use to connect with new audience segments and strengthen their presence in different markets.

To make this work, content and marketing teams need to team up. Content teams can focus on creating high-quality blog posts in the chosen languages, while marketing can increase the reach by promoting it on social media channels tailored to each language group.

This way, language-specific content doesn’t just match search trends—it also finds the right audience on the platforms they use most.

Simon Bacher of Ling says that “if we see a trend in search intent for specific languages, our content team will produce more blog content on that topic and our marketing team will promote these languages across socials.”

Colton De Vos of Resolute Technology Solution also talked about this tactic:

“By regularly reviewing Google Search Console data for which search terms are driving traffic and cross-comparing that against geographic traffic, our team has been able to tweak how certain pages rank in countries.

We were able to identify several pages that were driving lots of international web traffic but few local leads and take measures to rank these pages better locally – Google Maps insertions, more local backlinks, and aligning keyword focus to what terms people are using in our area.”

Using GA4 Event Tracking to Boost Customer Acquisition with Meta Ads

GA4’s event-based tracking gives marketers deep insights into what users are doing—product views, form submissions, and cart abandonment.

If you monitor these interactions, you can group audiences based on specific actions and use the data to create more relevant Meta Ads campaigns.

For example, users who leave items in their cart could see retargeting ads with a discount to nudge them to finish their purchase.

Ronald Dsouza of Fit You Today went into detail on this tactic and shared his specific plan:

“I’m leveraging GA4 to drive customer acquisition through Meta Ads. I’ve set up event-based tracking in GA4 to monitor key actions on my website, like product views and form submissions. This data helps me create custom audiences based on user behavior, which I then use for targeted retargeting campaigns on Meta Ads.

I also use GA4’s insights to build lookalike audiences, targeting potential new customers who share characteristics with my most valuable existing customers. This has helped me increase my reach while maintaining relevance, leading to better conversion rates.”

PRO TIP: Do you run ads on Facebook and have trouble making sense of their confusing reporting interface? Use our free Facebook Ads Campaign Performance Dashboard Template instead, where you can connect your data in one easy-to-understand dashboard. Track everything from amount spend to conversion rates by creative in one comprehensive screen.

Get the Most Out of Your Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console Data with Databox

Turning your website into a customer acquisition powerhouse starts with understanding what drives engagement—and what doesn’t.

Sure, it’s easy to gather traffic numbers, bounce rates, and session times, but without context, those metrics don’t reveal much about how effectively you’re attracting potential customers.

This is where Databox comes in to make more sense of your GA4 and GSC data.

Our Benchmark Groups give you direct insight into how other businesses are performing on similar metrics, so you can see where you’re ahead, where there’s room to improve, and what’s working best for others in your industry. You’ll get real-time insights into whether your organic traffic is on par with industry leaders.

And it doesn’t stop there. There’s also Databox Dashboards, where you can bring all of your essential GA4 and GSC data together in one place, making it easy to track, visualize, and act on it.

From acquisition metrics like traffic sources and click-through rates to deeper insights into user behavior, every detail is right at your fingertips.

You can quickly connect your data sources (we support 130+ integrations), select key metrics, and generate visual reports that make the data actionable.

Plus, by linking your Benchmark Group data directly to your dashboards, you gain a real-time comparison view without any extra setup—you can identify patterns, spot gaps, and refine your strategies with precision.

Sign up for a free Databox trial today and start making more sense of your GA4 and GSC data – without any complex setups, spreadsheet headaches, and manual reporting.

The post How to Leverage Your Website Analytics to Acquire New Customers? [Research Findings Based on 100+ Companies] appeared first on Databox.

Keywords are a fundamental part of SEO, and as such, you need to know how they’re performing. For that, you need to use the right tools.

We’ve asked 107 SEOs about the best keyword tracking tools. Here is what they recommend.

1. Why is Keyword Tracking Important?
2. How to Choose The Right Keywords to Optimize for SEO
3. The 23 Best Keyword Ranking Tools for SEO

Why is Keyword Tracking Important?

Keyword tracking helps you determine whether your SEO strategy is working and if your optimization efforts are indeed paying off. Here are the 5 most significant reasons to track keywords:

1. Monitor your competitors
2. Increase visibility 
3. Monitor rank drops
4. Identify keyword opportunities
5. Improve revenue

Monitor Your Competitors

Keyword tracking lets you know which keywords your competitors are ranking for and missing out on, allowing you to make an informed decision and choose the keywords you can actually rank for. Furthermore, tracking and analyzing keywords reveals how your competitors perform against your target keywords, their best performing content with the most high-quality backlinks, social engagement, and much more.

Increase Visibility

Keyword tracking reveals how well your target keywords rank in the SERP. This information helps you identify which keywords are the right choice for increasing your business or client’s visibility.

Monitor Rank Drops

Keyword tracking tools can also be used to monitor rank drops and identify the cause of that decline. Rank drops typically occur due to your competitors outranking you, technical errors, penalties, and similar. By spotting this information early on, you can easily take the necessary steps to address that problem, or in case if it’s a technical error or a penalty, to avoid the same problem in the future.

Identify Keyword Opportunities

Essentially, by tracking your most important keywords continuously, you’ll be able to identify an array of keyword opportunities based on search volume, competition, search intent, ranking pages, and determine which ones to prioritize.

Improve Revenue

By utilizing the KW opportunities and setting the right priorities, you can allocate your time and money to efforts that are guaranteed to yield an ROI.

Related: How to Track Your Keyword Rankings in Databox

How to Choose The Right Keywords to Optimize for SEO

1. Have a clear goal in mind: Before choosing your target keywords, it is important to understand why these keywords are useful for your business. Is your business looking to generate more sales or leads? To increase brand awareness or customer engagement? Depending on the overall goal, make a plan on how to successfully generate qualified leads using specific keywords or topics.

2. Understand keyword types: There are many different types of keywords you can use to rank your business in search engines. Most commonly used are short tail keywords (high search volume, high competitive rate, broad search intent, low conversion rate) and long-tail keywords (low search volume, low competitive rate, specific search intent, high conversion rate). 

There are also “fresh” keywords and “evergreen” keywords. As the name suggests, fresh keywords are the ones with suddenly explosive search volume, but they are relevant just for a specific amount of time. 

For example, when a new movie comes out (for example, Avengers Infinity War in 2018), or a worldwide event occurs (Coronavirus epidemic in 2020), keywords related to these events appear and get explosive search volume. These keywords have medium competitive rate, specific search intent, and high conversion rate.

Unlike fresh short tail keywords, evergreen keywords are relevant all the time. Examples would be “how to lose weight”, “tips for losing weight”, and similar things that include relevant “evergreen” topics people will always search for.

Keywords can be divided into many other different types and categories, starting from primary, secondary, and contextual keywords to intent targeting keywords, geo-targeting keywords, customer defining keywords, and so on.

3. Analyze search intent: Search intent is an important part of keyword research and your content marketing efforts at large. Luckily, you don’t have to guess why people search for certain keywords. By conducting those searches yourself on Google, you’ll be able to learn the general intent behind a particular keyword and its relevance to your products, services, or content offerings.

4. Check your competitors: Conduct a competitor analysis to find out what target keywords your competitors currently rank well for and the websites that rank on the first page of Google for your target keyword. Use this information to decide on what content to prioritize creating based on the topics, phrases your competitors currently rank for but have tons of opportunities for you to outrank them on.

5. Use keyword research tools: There are tons of amazing SEO tools available in the market you can leverage to help you come up with more keyword ideas and also to check the search volume and estimated traffic for keywords you’re considering.

Additionally, without the right SEO reporting software, tracking where your site ranks in organic search results for target keywords is a time-consuming process.

It’s less of a burden if you only check your rankings occasionally. But few SEOs are willing to go months without seeing how their efforts are impacting rankings. In fact, half of SEOs check their rankings either daily or multiple times a day, and another 37.7% check them weekly:

When you monitor rankings that closely—and at that frequency—manually checking Google’s search results for your target keywords is incredibly time-consuming. Using a keyword tracking tool is a much simpler, more efficient, and more cost-friendly option.

But which keyword tracking tool should you use?

To find out, we asked 107 SEOs to tell us about the keyword tracking tools they use to keep a close eye on how their site and pages are performing in organic search results. 

Most of our respondents use the tools they recommend to keep an eye out for both ranking increases and decreases:

Altogether, our respondents recommended 23 keyword tracking tools. Topping the list were Ahrefs and SEMrush, which both received 30 or more recommendations.

PRO TIP: How to Improve Your Google Rankings

To optimize your website for organic search, you probably use Google Search Console to learn which pages receive the most impressions and clicks, and which queries drive them. To get the information you need, you may need to visit several areas within GSC and view multiple reports.

Now you can quickly assess your overall SEO performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:

1. Impressions. See how many impressions and clicks your website pages receive in Google.
2. Average position. Track your average search position and monitor daily, weekly, or monthly fluctuations.
3. Position by pages. Learn the search results page position of any page on your website.
4. Position by queries. See how many search queries each position group receives.

And more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Search Console experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for monitoring your SEO performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Search Console account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Try this template

The Best Keyword Ranking Tools for SEO

Here are the best keyword tracking tools, listed in order of the number of recommendations received. For tools that received an equal number of recommendations, we’ve listed them in alphabetical order.

1. Ahrefs
2. SEMrush
3. Google Search Console
4. AccuRanker
5. Moz
6. GrowthBar
7. STAT
8. Advanced Web Ranking (AWR)
9. Pro Rank Tracker
10. SE Ranking
11. SEO PowerSuite – Rank Tracker
12. SERPWatcher by Mangools
13. Hike
14. Keyword Hero
15. Monitor Backlinks
16. Nightwatch.io
17. Rank Ranger
18. SEOmonitor
19. SerpBook
20. SERPBOT
21. SerpDB
22. Ubersuggest
23. Wincher

1. Ahrefs

Price: From $99/month

Of all of the keyword tracking tools on this list, Ahrefs was the most recommended, receiving 31 total recommendations.

“Ahrefs is an easy tool to use to keep track of your keyword rankings,” says Best Company’s Alayna Okerlund. “It provides a full view of keyword movements, shows you new keywords you’re ranking for, and lets you access a full list of all organic keywords for each page on your website.”

Other respondents provided many reasons why Ahrefs is their keyword tracking tool of choice:

Additionally, many respondents said they prefer Ahrefs because it lets you track keyword rankings and take advantage of other helpful SEO tools.

I’m already in Ahrefs all day looking at backlinks, and it’s great to have one tool that you can trust for keyword rankings and backlink analysis. Its keyword ranking tools have come a long way and are very accurate.

Paul Teitelman

SEO Expert at Paul Teitelman SEO Consulting

Want to get highlighted in our next report? Become a contributor now

Abhijith VM of Geek’s Framework says that all of the tools that Ahrefs offers in its subscription make planning easier:

“The ability to report rankings based on location and browser language along with the ability to display SERP features like site links, image packs and local packs makes it easier for us to understand the impact a keyword’s position is going to have on our website.”

It’s worth noting that some SEOs actually consider rank tracking a weakness of Ahrefs’ toolkit. Ryan Prior of Marketing Arsenal doesn’t recommend Ahrefs as a rank tracking tool, primarily because it only updates every 3-7 days. Since the majority of SEOs check their rankings daily, that’s something to take into consideration.

Related: Here’s How to Use Ahrefs for SEO (According to 97 Marketers)

2. SEMrush

Price: From $$129.95/month

SEMrush was the second most-recommended keyword tracking tool, earning 30 total recommendations—just one recommendation shy of Ahrefs.

“I use SEMrush on a daily basis to track both our keywords and our clients’ keywords,” says Colin Mosier of JSL Marketing & Web Design. 

“When we begin a campaign, we use SEMrush to determine which keywords to target during the campaign. We are able to find the monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, cost-per-click, and more.” 

“Once we determine which keywords to target, SEMRush allows us to input the keywords into a tracking program that tracks the rankings, visibility, and average traffic from the keywords.”

“Overall, I recommend SEMrush because it is extremely easy to use and has multiple features that allow for comprehensive keyword tracking and optimization,” Mosier says.

Other respondents offered a variety of reasons why SEMrush is their tool of choice:

“SEMrush is easy to use and cost-effective,” says Growth Hackers’ Jonathan Aufray. “You have a free trial where you can check 10 URLs a day, and the cost of the paid version cost is reasonable. You can use it for SEO as well as for SEM (Google Ads).” 

“It’s an all-in-one SEO tool. Not only you can check keyword rankings, but you can also check your competitors’ rankings, your backlinks, and much more,” Aufray says.

Related: The 25 Most Powerful SEMrush Features for Improving Your Search Rankings

3. Google Search Console

Price: Free

The next most-recommended keyword tracking tool was Google Search Console, receiving eight total votes.

“Google Search Console is the only keyword tracking tool I use,” says James Green of Offer To Close. “Not only does Google have the inside track on its own data, but it is also able to account for the differences in search caused by personalized search results.”

Several respondents said they use Google Search Console for its accuracy:

• “Google Search Console is the most accurate tool, and it also happens to be completely free.” (Kris Gunnars, Search Facts)
• “Rank is tricky to track, but Google Search Console is one of the most accurate tools to use when tracking most SEO metrics.” (Alice Stevens, Best Company)
• “I used to use Ahrefs for keyword tracking, but after doing an audit, I found that many of the keyword rankings listed were inaccurate. After switching to Google Search Console, I found that the results were much more accurate.” (McCall Robison, Best Company)
• “It’s the only tool that gives you true rankings and shows you actual click data. Most of the others show you aggregate rankings and estimated traffic.” (Brooks Manley, Engenius)

“Within the Performance report, you can see what keywords are triggering your website to show on Google search result pages, plus their click-through-rates and average positions,” says Casey Bryan of Grand Cru Digital. “You can also adjust the date range to see how a website has performed over a certain timeframe.”

In addition to tracking keyword performance, an effective marketing report can provide valuable insights into your overall digital marketing strategy. This data helps you refine your SEO approach, reach your target audience more effectively, and ultimately drive better results for your business.

And Conversion Hut’s Dale Broadhead says that pairing Google Search Console with Google Analytics is a great way to track keyword rankings:

“Doing this will allow you to do a much deeper analysis of the keywords that are driving traffic to your website. You can get insights into which devices and countries are driving clicks, as well as the impressions and click-through rates for particular search queries.” 

“Even though this data is all available in Google Search Console, Google Analytics makes it much easier to analyze the data,” Broadhead says.

Related: How to Use Google Keyword Planner to Research & Target the Right Keywords (According to 30 Marketers)

4. AccuRanker

Price: From €116/month

“I’d recommend using AccuRanker,” says Newaz Chowdhury of Powerphrase. “It’s pretty accurate, and it’s definitely the fastest rank tracker in the industry.”

Amrita Jaswal of RestroApp agrees: “AccuRanker has an excellent user experience for an SEO tool. There’s no need to read through long lists of data to understand key metrics.”

And Priyanka Mehra of Signity Solutions offers a long list of reasons for recommending AccuRanker:

• “Its rankings closely match what you’ll find doing manual searches on Google.”
• “You can check keyword rankings by location and browser.”
• “You can add unlimited domains and grant access to your team members and clients.”
• “It’s easy to segment and filter your data to target precise datasets.”
• “You can easily review changes in your previous keyword rankings.”
• “It’s easy to organize large keyword data with their tag cloud and landing page features.”

5. Moz

Price: From $99/month

“We have had a lot of success with Moz’s keyword ranking tools,” says Andrew McLoughlin of Colibri Digital Marketing. “The automated checking and reporting seriously streamlines our process, and the numbers are quite reliable.”

Danny Peavey of One Week Website also recommends Moz: “It’s simple and straightforward, but it also offers an in-depth analysis into what’s working and what’s not, along with suggestions for improvement.”

“Moz is a fantastic tool for tracking keyword rankings across multiple search engines and geographies,” says Attio’s Alex Vale. 

“I recommend it not only because it is the industry leader and maintains the world’s largest keyword database, but also because it provides accurate keyword volumes and ranking difficulties for keyword research,” Vale says.

Jordan Daly of ADK Group agrees: “Moz can do so much throughout the entirety of an SEO/keyword lifecycle: find keyword ideas, track rankings, identify long-tail keyword markets, find featured snippet opportunities, and run site audits.

6. GrowthBar

Price: Free for 5 Days, From $34/month

The next most-recommended keyword tracking tool was GrowthBar. Among the benefits and features mentioned, there was excitement about the ease of use, the pleasing design of the tool, and the affordability when compared to other options.

“GrowthBar is one of my favorite keyword tracking tools because it brings keyword research directly to me when I’m already on Google. I love the tool’s integrated design, and it’s super easy to track new keyword ideas, competitors, and traffic metrics in one place,” says Adam Enfroy.

“I started using GrowthBar just a few months ago, and now I can’t imagine doing SEO and keyword tracking without it,” says Dean Ramadan of Wheel. “It’s super easy to use, and you can access your keyword tracking dashboard directly from the SERP.

“You’re able to track multiple domains over time and track several keywords at once. It has a beautifully designed data dashboard that allows you to not only track ranking position, but also how hard it is to rank for a certain term and the average word count of the page 1 search results. It just makes your life much easier and allows you to take action right away.”

“GrowthBar has the ability to transform your Google Chrome extension into a powerful SEO analysis tool. With this lightweight extension, you can do keyword research, position tracking, competitor analysis, and much more. A must-have extension for anyone who wants to rank higher in search results and get more organic traffic.” (Sandeep Mallya of 99Signals)

“I use GrowthBar to check our keyword rankings daily because it doesn’t have clutter like other keyword tracking tools. It’s easy to use and easy to look at. I get what I need in just a few minutes. I could also re-check rankings any time, whereas, in other tools, it’s limited to just one re-check per day. The feature I like the most is that GrowthBar also recommends other keywords that I could target based on the current keywords I am targeting, which makes it easier for me to plan our content strategy.” (Adrian Crisostomo of SEO Hacker)

7. STAT

Price: From $720/month

“If you don’t mind paying for a membership, definitely consider subscribing to STAT for a comprehensive keyword tracking tool,” says Emily Banks of Inseev Interactive. “STAT allows you to track hundreds of thousands of keywords—across different markets, across the world, every day.” 

“By getting a comprehensive view of the most relevant keywords dominating your market’s niche, you can learn more about your target audience and their interests.” 

“You can also detect patterns in the data by sorting based on a variety of qualifiers such as SERP features, rank position, or URL—actions not available on many free keyword tracking tools,” Banks says.

Tom Donohoe of Tom Donohoe Consulting also recommends STAT: “It allows you to easily scale keyword rank tracking at an affordable rate. The best feature is the API, which lets you take the data and store it in your own database. The user interface also provides data visualization for ad hoc analysis.”

“I’ve been using STAT for a year now, and it’s by far the best tool I’ve used in my nine years as an SEO,” says Steve Toth of SEO Notebook. “It allows you to take a step back from tracking individual keywords and lets you look at the bigger picture (especially when you are tracking thousands of keywords).”

“It has a unique feature called ‘share-of-voice’ that looks at keyword sets (could be 10 keywords, could be 10,000). It checks the ranking of each keyword, assigns more weight to higher-ranking keywords in higher-volume SERPs, and vice versa. Then. it gives you the top 10 sites around those weighted scores.” 

“It also tracks these shifts from week-to-week. So you’re not just watching the progression of a single keyword but entire topic clusters. It’s very cool!”

“Its interface is a little Screaming Frog-esque, but to me, that’s part of the charm. The visualizations don’t look like they’re created by a graphic designer, but the way in which the data is aggregated speaks for itself.”

“STAT was acquired by Moz in late 2018, but so far, not much has changed. To be honest, I hope it stays that way. If you’re tracking over a thousand keywords, I would try it; you can track your competitors, too,” Toth says.

8. Advanced Web Ranking (AWR)

Price: From $49/month

“I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, and I can confidently say that no other tool is more reliable than Advanced Web Ranking,” says Julien Raby of Nerf Gun Center. “It is super affordable and reliable. Back when I had an SEO agency, I could automatically send ranking reports to my clients.”

“It also has a useful metric called visibility score. Search rankings always fluctuate, and sometimes it’s hard to see if, globally, we’re doing better or not. This metric aggregates all search positions of all search engines in one simple number (and tracks it every week),” Raby says.

Kenzi Wood of Kenzi Writes agrees: “I’ve been using Advanced Web Ranking for years, and I love it. It’s easy to understand, and you can pull client reports automatically.”

9. Pro Rank Tracker

Price: From $25/month

“I’ve tested almost every keyword tool out there and found Pro Rank Tracker to be the most accurate for tracking keyword rankings by city, region, device, etc.,” says Kyle Sanders of Complete SEO.

“Most keyword rank trackers get thrown off due to the high amount of variance in local search where proximity and device type can seriously skew results. Pro Rank Tracker is consistently the most accurate when we spot-check against rankings we’re able to reproduce manually,” Sanders says.

Jordon Goodman of Blue Digital also recommends Pro Rank Tracker: “The best feature is the historical data that you receive along with the keyword’s current rankings, which lets you compare how the keyword is performing.”

10. SE Ranking

Price: From $18.6/month

“We have used several different tools for rank tracking, but what we found was that we just needed something simple and reliable without all the bells and whistles,” says Dan Christensen of Pest Rank. “SE Ranking has put on some awesome lifetime deals for their rank tracking service, and we cashed in.”

“They do guest links for clients, offer reports and audits, and are consistently rolling out other cool features,” Christensen says.

Anastasiia Khlystova of HelpCrunch also recommends SE Ranking and says, “they have rich databases for different countries, not just the U.S. Since I track my keyword rankings almost every day, it’s important for me to get near real-time updates, which SE Ranking totally delivers.”

“Its data is 100% accurate and fresh, and it offers much more than just keywords tracking (with their Website Audit being my all-time favorite SEO feature),” Khlystova says.

11. SEO PowerSuite – Rank Tracker

Price: Free license available

“Far and away, one of the best rank tracker tools I have used—and continue to use—is the Rank Tracker application that comes in the SEO PowerSuite bundle,” says John Donnachie of ClydeBank Media.

“It’s an awesome tool that runs smoothly, has an intuitive interface, and has the ability to handle large numbers of keywords while generating helpful reports at a moment’s notice. We have been using it at our organization for about six months and really like the entire bundle,” Donnachie says.

Rob Heywood of Audana NW agrees: “It’s just as accurate as paid competitors, and it comes with a free option that includes unlimited keywords. The drawback with the free version is that you cannot save your position history, so you need to copy it to Excel or Google Sheets to keep a record.”

12. SERPWatcher by Mangools

Price: From $29.90/month

“I’ve been using SERPWatcher by Mangools for the last few years now, and it’s fantastic,” says Carlo Barajas of Surface SEO. “It’s included as part of their incredibly-affordable suite of SEO tools, which allows you to track far more keywords for less money.” 

“The tracker includes a feature called the ‘Dominance Index,’ which is essentially a calculation of your total visibility for your target keywords. Lastly, the interface allows you to easily make annotations along the graph to note things like verified Google algorithm updates and the like,” Barajas says.

“I use SERPWatcher by Mangools daily,” says Irena Zobniow of Insightland. “You can see changes in positions, average monthly search volumes, and estimated traffic. I highly recommend it to every SEO expert!”

13. Hike

Price: From $39.99/month

“No one tool is right for everyone,” says Kevin D’Arcy of ThinkFuel Marketing. “Internally, we use SEMrush for all of our clients. We find it extremely powerful, and the ability to connect their keyword rank tracking with their other SEO tools is second to none.” 

“That being said, I would not recommend it for a novice user. It can be intimidating. If you’re looking for a great tool that is easy to use and easy to set up, I would recommend Hike.”

14. Keyword Hero

Price: Free option available

“Keyword Hero’s semantic algorithm helps you see over 90% of your keywords,” says Branko Kral of Chosen Data. “It’s like going back in time to when Google used to share that publicly, but better. 

“The tool creates a Google Analytics property for you so that you can relate keyword rankings to a goal in your Google Analytics. Stellar.”

15. Monitor Backlinks

Price: From $25/month

“The one tool I would recommend for keyword tracking is Monitor Backlinks,” says Sean Dudayev of Frootful Marketing. “I’ve used this tool for over six years, and it’s the most user-friendly SEO tracking tool that I have come across.” 

“It’s a simple dashboard app that shows you your keyword positions, average keyword position changes over time, and how those positions are influencing traffic—as well as how your link building efforts are influencing both.” 

“You can track your keywords, traffic, and links all in one digital dashboard. This makes it very easy to see what part of your SEO campaign is most successful. It also shows you ranking changes for keywords over time.” 

“For me, its friendly UI makes it easy to analyze data and draw conclusions.”

16. Nightwatch.io

Price: From $19/month

“The number-one tool we use for keyword rank tracking is Nightwatch.io,” says Andrew Jacobson of 9thCO. 

“It allows our team to track not only the overall and individual performance of keyword rankings for our clients, but we can also break down the tracking by geography so we can see exactly how a keyword is performing in specifically targeted cities or regions.”

17. Rank Ranger

Price: From $69/month

“The best ranking tool I work with is Rank Ranger,” says Liraz Postan of LP Marketing Services. “It allows me to check my daily rankings and also see detailed information on above-the-fold and below-the-fold rankings, which helps me optimize my organic CTRs.”

18. SEOmonitor

Price: From €199/month

“I’ve used many keyword tools, but I’ve stuck with SEOmonitor for years,” says Jason Brooks of Linkology. “It runs off of Google Search Console and Google Analytics data and uses a clever formula for estimating the elusive ‘not provided’ keyword traffic.”

“The interface allows you to group keywords into clusters, which allows you to monitor rankings for a topic. They offer multiple ways to view performance—including by page or keyword—so it’s easy to drill down and see what needs your attention.”

“A major bonus of SEOmonitor is the pitching tool, which allows you to forecast the financial impact of improving rankings for a group of keywords.”

“On top of all this, the competitor analysis and keyword research tools are strong, so overall it’s a good package for the money.”

19. SerpBook

Price: From $52/month

“For organic keyword analytics and to track the rank of a domain, I use SerpBook,” says Reuben Kats of GrabResults. “SerpBook categorizes and ranks keywords to create the best results, provides tracking and management, and delivers the best keyword data.”

20. SERPBOT

Price: Free for up to 50 keywords

“I’d recommend SERPBOT for keyword ranking tracking,” says Ayesha Ambreen of Right Solution. “It is a fuss-free tool that allows you to see real-time rankings. The tool also allows businesses to track keyword rankings, as well as volumes, recent changes in rankings, URLs found, etc.”

“I particularly like and recommend the tool because it is simple to use and needs almost no clicks, filters, or complicated report views to see the results. Just click on the project name, and you can see all the rankings and details in a simple Excel-like interface.”

21. SerpDB

Price: Available by quote only

“I like Ahrefs for pretty much everything, including rank tracking,” says HubSpot’s Alex Birkett. “But if you want to own your SERP data, try out something like SerpDB, which writes Google search results to your own database.”

22. Ubersuggest

Price: Free

“The most effective tool I’ve used is Ahrefs, but it comes with a hefty price tag,” says Riley Adams of Young and the Invested. “As a result, I rely on Ubersuggest from Neil Patel.” 

“It provides useful detail on monthly search volume and seasonality over the previous 12 months, as well as search and paid difficulties. I use this information to guide my content creation for targeting keywords for which I might be able to rank.” 

“Also, while reported on a time delay, it does show the SERPs for the associated keywords for tracking your placement in the results.”

23. Wincher

Price: From $19/month

“There are lots of tools out there, and I’d say Ahrefs is the most comprehensive on the market today,” says Oren Greenberg of Kurve. “However, if you’re looking to keep costs down and have a basic but effective keyword ranking tracking tool, Wincher is a great alternative.”

Even With a Tool, You May Need to Do Some Manual Checking

Several of our respondents talked about accuracy as one of the most valuable features of the keyword tracking tools they use. However, even with an accurate tool, you still may need to do some manual double-checking. In fact, more than half of our respondents (57.9%) double-check the rankings provided by their tracking tools.

But if you don’t want to bother with manually checking your rankings, a couple of respondents recommended using multiple tools.

For example, Jake Fisher of Bridges Strategies & Digital Marketing says, “We think SEMrush is good. But we prefer to have multiple sources, so we compare results in Ahrefs and Moz.”

And Cai Simpson of Victory Digital says, “Using a number of keyword tracking tools is recommended due to localization of the search engine rankings. While one tool gives you one position, another may give you a completely different result.” 

“For the best results, I recommend a combination of SEMRush, Advanced Web Ranking, and Ahrefs cross-referenced with Google Search Console,” Simpson says. “Automating this process is key for tracking keyword ranking averages.”

Which Rank Tracking Tool is the Best Fit for You?

Each of the online rank tracking tools reviewed here has its pros and cons.

To help you narrow down your selection, we’ll recommend the best keyword tracking tools based on several different scenarios. We are considering only the tools that have received at least two recommendations from our survey respondents.

• If you’re a beginner, choose Google Search Console.
• If you want a free tool, also choose Google Search Console.
• If you’re an individual or small business, choose SE Ranking or SEMrush.
• If you’re looking for the best dashboard, choose SERPWatcher, SEMrush, or Ahrefs.
• If you run an agency, choose ProRankTracker, SE Ranking, Advanced Web Ranking, AgencyAnalytics, or SEMrush.
• If you are looking for an all-in-one SEO platform, choose SERPWatcher, SE Ranking, SEMrush or Ahrefs.

The post The 23 Best Keyword Tracking Tools (According to 107 SEOs) appeared first on Databox.

Using Google Search Console can answer all of this and more (so much more).

It’s one of the most robust SEO tools in the industry, and it’s completely free.

Which begs the question – why does it fly under the radar for so many online businesses?

One of the potential reasons why so many marketers overlook the importance of Google Search Console for SEO might be due to its non-intuitive interface and overall complexity.

But that’s still not a good excuse to miss out on some potentially rank-changing insights that can significantly improve the visibility of your business.

In this article, we will Google Search Consolidate your knowledge of this amazing tool, cover all the basics, and show you how to use it.

While Google Search Console gives you raw search data, many teams still struggle to interpret what actually changed and why. Instead of manually digging through reports, teams now use AI data analysts like https://databox.com/mcp to ask simple questions about performance and get clear answers based on their own metrics, definitions, and historical data. This makes it easier to understand traffic shifts, ranking drops, or indexing issues in plain language, without guessing what the numbers mean or jumping between multiple reports.

After that, we’ll present insights from 100+ experts who shared the unique ways they use Google Search Console to increase traffic and rankings.

• What is Google Search Console?
• Why is Google Search Console Important for SEO?
• Get Started with Google Search Console
• Understanding Google Search Console Features and Reports
• How to Use Google Search Console for SEO
• Automate SEO Reporting with Databox

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free Google tool that helps you stay on top of your website’s SEO performance, diagnose technical SEO issues, improve rankings, and maintain your site’s digital presence.

The tool provides the most cutting-edge, real-time SEO data available, making it an indispensable ingredient in your SEO stew.

From search performance and user experience-related metrics to discovering security issues, it’s a bit absurd that Google Search Console doesn’t cost a dime.

Startup companies or marketers that are just beginning to learn about optimization and SEO, in general, can rely on Google Search Console as their all-in-one SEO tool.

Why is Google Search Console Important for SEO?

Google Search Console does by far the best job of communicating relevant data between Google and SEO managers.

It offers certain features and information for improving SEO performance that no other SEO tool in the industry can compete with – both technical and content-wise.

Here is how to use Google Search Console to improve SEO:

• Monitor organic traffic, keyword ranking, CTR (click-through rate), average position, traffic data, etc.
• Track index coverage and check whether web pages are properly indexed by Google crawlers.
• Identify removals, disavow files, and sitemaps.
• Make sure page experience, and Core Web Vitals are performing properly.
• Troubleshoot and identify mobile usability issues.
• Check out which manual actions and security issues Google marked
• Analyze crucial backlink data (internal links, external links, top linking sites and pages, and anchor text allocation).

All of this helps you stay on top of your SEO performance, identify any issues, and improve it.

Get Started with Google Search Console

Getting started with Google Search Console can be a bit complicated, which is one of the main reasons why so many SEOs hesitate to use it.

That’s why we’ve broken down the entire process into several segments that you should be able to follow with ease.

Here’s how to get started with Google Search Console.

• Open an Account
• Verify Site Ownership
• Add a Sitemap to Google Search Console
• Add a User to Google Search Console

Set Up a Google Search Console Account

If you don’t already have one, go to Google Search Console’s official page to create an account.

Next, select a property type by adding your website address to either the domain or URL prefix tab (as seen below).

Lastly, verify that you own the site by using your Google Analytics tracking ID.

Quick reminder: The Google Analytics tracking ID can be found in Admin > Property Settings > Basic Settings > Tracking ID.

The next time you log in to your Google Analytics account, you’ll be able to access Google Search Console via the sidebar as well.

Verify Site Ownership

To access data from Google Search Console, as we mentioned, you need to verify site ownership. Other than using your Google Analytics tracking ID, there are two ways you can do this depending on the property type you added.

The first one is Domain Property Verification, and you can start by checking if your domain is registered with any of the listed providers.

If so, select your provider and hit the “Start verification” button. From there, you just need to sign in to your account and follow the instructions.

If you can’t find your registrar, select “Any DNS provider.”

Then, proceed to sign in to your account with your domain provider, select your domain, and look for an option to manage DNS or Domain Name Servers.

Choose the option to add a TXT record, and then paste in the record from Google Search Console. Save it and verify it.

The second verification type is URL Prefix Property Verification. 

There are several ways you can do this, but the recommended method is to upload an HTML file to your website.

Add a Sitemap to Google Search Console

Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console is important because it helps Google find and crawl important content on your website.

To submit a sitemap to Search Console, go to “Sitemaps”, and simply paste the URL of your XML sitemap into the box labeled “Enter sitemap URL”. After that, hit “Submit.”

Add a User to Google Search Console

Users are people who have access to some or all of the data in Google Search Console.

A user can be an Owner, Full User, or Restricted User.

When you verify a property in the Search Console, you become an Owner.

This means you can add new users by navigating to Search Console > Choose a property > Settings > Users and permissions > Add user

Type their email address and select either full or restricted access. To revoke or changes access, you can always come back and adjust your settings.

Understanding Google Search Console Features and Reports

Google Search Console provides a handful of different reports and features that SEOs can use, but navigating through them isn’t exactly simple.

Let’s go through an overview of the different Google Search Console SEO reports and features and explain what they’re all about.

• Google Search Console Overview
• URL Inspection Tool
• Performance Report
• Index Report
• Experience Report
• Security Issues Report
• Manual Actions
• Links Report

Google Search Console Overview Report

When you open up your Google Search Console account, the first thing you’ll see is an Overview report, which includes a brief summary of your website/property.

It’s essentially an overview of your website’s most significant data within GSC.

The Overview report captures metrics like manual actions, indexed pages, and more. Plus, you can see more specific things like Search Analytics, Sitemaps, and Crawl Errors by opening one of the listed links.

You can use this report to identify larger issues quickly and check out how your site’s performing overall.

URL Inspection Tool

The URL inspection tool lets you see how Google views a specific page on your website.

You can use the tool to check whether a page is crawled or indexed by Google and troubleshoot the issue in case the page doesn’t appear in search results.

Additionally, you can identify errors linked to mobile usability, HTML, and JavaScript and let your development team know that they should be fixed.

To use the tool, simply copy-paste the URL of the desired page and click enter.

This will prompt a window where you’ll be able to check out page results and see whether the URL is indexed.

Performance Report

The Performance Report offers users valuable insights into your website’s search performance.

The first part of this report showcases search features such as featured snippets.

You can explore four different search types, including Web, Image, Video, and News.

The Web search is set by default, but you can change it by pressing the ‘Search Type’ button.

At the top of the Performance Report, you will see four metrics displayed:

• Total Clicks – How often users click on your website in the search results.
• Total Impressions – The number of times your website appeared in a search result.
• Average CTR – Percentage of the average number of times users click on your website in the search results.
• Average Position – As the name suggests, your website’s average position in search results.

At the bottom part of the Performance Report, users can find six different dimensions of performance data:

• Queries – Displays the highest search queries and keyword performance.
• Pages – Displays the best-ranked web pages.
• Countries – Leading countries
• Devices – Shows which devices visitors most frequently use (mobile, tablet, and desktop).
• Search Appearance – Shows which types of results the website was displayed in.
• Dates – Sorts the impressions and clicks by date.

Index Report

The index report shows you whether Google is crawling your website and if there are any problems preventing your pages from getting indexed.

Once you open up the report, you’ll notice a simple chart that displays changes related to the number of indexed pages (in the last 90 days).

There are four colors that represent different statuses:

• Red – Error
• Yellow – Valid with warning
• Green – Completely valid
• Grey – Excluded

Naturally, you’ll want to deal with the errors first since they present the biggest issue when it comes to your content getting indexed.

Experience Report

The Experience report provides you with data related to your website’s visitor’s user experience.

In this report, Google examines experience metrics for specific URLs on your website and uses them as ranking signals for search result URLs.

This is the criteria that Google uses:

• Core Web Vitals – Tests your website’s page loading speed, responsiveness, and overall stability. You can get a rating of Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor. 
• Mobile Usability – To rank for a ‘Good’ status on mobile devices, there mustn’t be any mobile usability errors in the mobile URL.
• HTTPS Usage – Pages have to be served over HTTPS to get a ‘Good’ page ranking in Google search.

Security Issues Report

The Security Issues report showcases any information that might suggest your website has been hacked or if it’s acting suspiciously and could potentially harm a visitor.

By ‘acting suspiciously,’ Google refers to phishing attacks and installing malware on the visitor’s computer.

If your page is hit with a security issue, there will typically be a warning label in the search results or a warning page when visitors try to open the page.

There are three categories of security issues:

• Hacked content – Content on your website that was posted without your permission.
• Malware/Unwanted Software – Software created to harm a visitor’s device.
• Social Engineering – Dangerous content that can make the visitors do something risky (e.g. reveal personal information).

Manual Actions

This report shows you whether there are any manual actions issued against your website.

In other words, whether there are any pages that aren’t compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines, which results in search result shadow bans.

If one of your pages is affected by manual action, you will receive a notification in the Search Console message center.

Links Report

The Links report displays all the links pointing to your website.

However, you should know that this report doesn’t showcase links that influence your site’s search result ranking.

Instead, it only focuses on links that aren’t helping with the SERP rank.

There are columns in the report – external and internal links.

For external links, there are three reports, including Top Linked Pages, Top Linking Sites, and Top Linking Text.

For internal links, there is only one report – Top Linked Pages.

Each of these reports includes a gateway to additional results that can be clicked to view.

For instance, if we expand the Top Linked Pages report, we’ll be able to see Top Target Pages (most frequently linked pages from the website).

PRO TIP: How to Improve Your Google Rankings

To optimize your website for organic search, you probably use Google Search Console to learn which pages receive the most impressions and clicks, and which queries drive them. To get the information you need, you may need to visit several areas within GSC and view multiple reports.

Now you can quickly assess your overall SEO performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:

1. Impressions. See how many impressions and clicks your website pages receive in Google.
2. Average position. Track your average search position and monitor daily, weekly, or monthly fluctuations.
3. Position by pages. Learn the search results page position of any page on your website.
4. Position by queries. See how many search queries each position group receives.

And more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Search Console experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for monitoring your SEO performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Search Console account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Try this template

How to Use Google Search Console for SEO: 20 Pro Tips

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics regarding Google Search Console, let’s check out the tips that the SEOs we surveyed recommend.

We talked to 100+ marketers, and here are some of the best Google Search Console SEO tips that they shared.

1. Use Search Console for Keyword Research
2. Check Your Average Position for Specific Queries
3. Check for Website Coverage Issues
4. Identify Crawl Errors and Unindexable Pages
5. Optimize Your Website Pages for Mobile Search
6. Check Your Backlink Profile
7. See if Your Site Has Any Penalties
8. Use International Targeting Report for Prioritizing a Specific Country in Search Results
9. Analyze Mobile vs. Desktop Traffic
10. Prevent Keyword Cannibalization Issues
11. Check the Canonical Domain Settings
12. Change Meta Tags and Monitor the CTR Impact
13. Monitor high CTR Keywords and Optimize Around Them
14. Find Exploding Topics
15. Find Internal Linking Opportunities
16. Compare Your Search Performance to Previous Periods
17. Determine Which Pages Are Wasting Your Crawl Budget
18. Decrease Your Bounce Rate by Identifying Negative Keywords
19. Give Google More Information about Your Site without Adding Structured Data
20. Find FAQs in Google Search Console with RegEx

Use Search Console for Keyword Research

Google Search Console’s Performance Report contains many of the basic pieces of data you’ll need to rely on for SEO. One of those is the keywords that your site and pages rank for, called “queries” within the tool.

To use Google Search Console for keyword research, get started by logging in to the tool, clicking Performance, and scrolling down the page to reach the Queries tab.

The Queries tab will be selected by default.

Below it, you can scroll and page through the list to see every keyword you show up for in search results across your entire website.

If you want to see what keywords your individual pages rank for, you’ll need to take a couple more steps. First, click the Pages tab, and then select the page you want to review.

Now, click the “Queries” tab again. Here, you’ll see all of the keywords that the specific page you selected in the last step ranks for.

If you want to look at keywords for a different page, return to the Pages tab, dismiss the currently selected page, select the next page you want to view, and click Queries again.

Additionally, Google Search Console’s keyword tool can also be used for improving local SEO.

Here’s how Tony Mastri of MARION Marketing Agency does it.

“I habitually add a URL query to the primary website field within GMB, then use Google Search Console to see what keywords searchers are using to find and click on my local results,” says Mastri.

“By using the Exact URL page filter in GSC, you can differentiate standard organic clicks to a page vs. local organic clicks to a page. This provides granular search term information that can be used to advance local SEO efforts.”

Related: 14 Free Ways to Research and Analyze Keywords for Blog Posts

Check Your Average Position for Specific Queries

Another metric available in the performance report is the average position. Position refers to where you’re ranked in the search results for specific keywords.

If you’re in the top results, your position is 1. If you’re at the top of page two, your position might be 11.

Average position is an average (sum of positions divided by the total number of keywords) of your positions for every keyword you rank for. 

Even though average position isn’t the best indicator of your site’s overall health, a good average position in GSC is considered anything around 30 or lower.

The general report shows the average of your positions for every keyword your entire site ranks for. If you filter by page, it shows the average of positions for all keywords a specific page ranks for. 

For this reason, the average position usually isn’t the most helpful piece of data. However, if you scroll down to the table below the graph, it will show you what position you rank in for each individual keyword. And this data can be much more insightful.

Using this data, you can not only see exactly where each page of your site ranks for specific keywords, but also use it to monitor how your rankings change after you make on-site adjustments and optimizations.

Related: 29 Ways to Improve Your Search Position in Google Search Results

Check for Website Coverage Issues

Using Google Search Console’s Coverage Report, you can see exactly how many pages of your site Google has indexed.

Click Pages within the index report to see the data.

For larger sites, it’s recommended to compare the number of pages that you’ve submitted via XML sitemap with the actual number of pages that have been indexed by Google.

This is one of the most important steps to take in order to determine if your site has crawling, indexing, and/or content duplication issues.

If you find that a specific page of your site isn’t in Google’s index, you can submit it for indexing using the URL inspection tool:

1. Click URL inspection.
2. Paste the URL you want to submit into the search bar and wait for Google’s test to complete.
3. If Google doesn’t find any errors, click Request Indexing.

It may take anywhere from a few hours to a few days for Google to process your request, crawl the page, and add it to its index.

Identify Crawl Errors and Unindexable Pages

Sometimes, developers will add canonical or no-index tags to a page to temporarily prevent Google from crawling it, but they may forget to later remove those tags.

Other times, you delete a page and forget to redirect it to a new page.

Fortunately, Google Search Console logs issues for these types of problems, so you don’t need to inspect the HTML of each page to look for errors.

You can find these errors in the Index report by clicking Pages and reviewing the data presented. Google Search Console will tell you why certain pages haven’t been indexed.

Google Search Console Page indexing tool not only shows which pages aren’t indexed, but it also explains why those pages weren’t indexed. It can help you identify a range of issues, such as developer mistakes in indexing, 404 errors on pages, and more.

404 errors are usually a result of old or broken links which have previously been indexed by Google. But with this feature, you can easily find URLs on your domain that are producing them.

Related: Google Analytics 404 Report: How to Monitor, Find and Fix 404 Errors in GA

Optimize Your Website Pages for Mobile Search

With Google rolling out its mobile-first indexing, it’s now more crucial than ever that all pages on your website are mobile-friendly.

Luckily, Google Search Console makes it easy to find any mobile page issues.

Just click on “Mobile Usability” and look to see if you have any errors. If so, scroll down the page to get more details.

Google Search Console allows you to quickly check if the pages on your website are responsive and whether they load quickly, as well as if all the elements on the page fit well (such as ensuring fonts aren’t too small to read on mobile).

The best thing is that this tool will also tell you what needs to be corrected. This ensures that your webpages are providing a better mobile experience for visitors—and that they end up ranking higher in search.

Check Your Backlink Profile

Google Search Console’s Links Report shows you what sites have linked to your site, what pages other sites link to most often, and what pages have the most links. 

To see all of your site’s backlinks, click the “Links” tab, then click “More” under “Top linking sites” to view all of your inbound links.

Related: 30 Free Link Building Tips for Building Links On Little-to-No Budget

See if Your Site Has Any Penalties

If Google determines that your site violates its quality guidelines, it can issue a manual action against your site, which could result in your entire site getting removed from its index.

Typically, manual actions are the result of things like buying backlinks, publishing scraped or low-quality content, keyword stuffing, or sneaky redirects. 

If you or someone you’ve hired to work on your site ever engaged in any questionable practices to boost your SEO, it’s worth checking to see if you’ve been issued a manual penalty.

But, you can also be issued a manual penalty for things other people did to your site.

If Google believes your site was hacked, it may remove it from its index. It can also issue a penalty if your site is full of low-quality comments with links that point to questionable sites.

Hopefully, manual penalties aren’t something you’ll ever have to worry about, but if your traffic drops rapidly and you aren’t sure why, it’s worth checking the “Manual actions” report to see if you’ve been issued a penalty. If so, you can find instructions for how to fix the issue and get your site reindexed.

Use International Targeting Report for Prioritizing a Specific Country in Search Results

The International Targeting report includes a “Country” tab that site owners can use for prioritizing specific countries in search results.

This is important because search results can be different for a user in Greece and a user in the UK.

If you use a generic domain (.com or .org) you can help Google pinpoint which countries matter the most to you.

On the other hand, if your use a country-coded domain (e.g., .fr), you are already associated with a geographic location (in this case, France). This disallows you from specifying a geographic location.

“One tip for using Google Search Console to track SERPs would be to keep an eye on the countries tab that shows your results,” says Anjana Wickramaratne of Active Digi Solutions.

“Some people only care about the Google Search Console queries that they rank for, but in reality, the countries that they rank for are valuable as well. By monitoring the countries in your SERPs, you are able to adjust your future SEO strategies to target the countries that you want.”

Analyze Mobile vs. Desktop Traffic

To stay on top of both “fronts,” you should make an effort to analyze both mobile and desktop traffic and figure out ways to optimize them.

A lot of companies make the mistake of focusing solely on desktop traffic, despite the fact that more searches are conducted on mobile devices (64%) than on desktop (36%).

Finn Hayden of You Well recommends: “look at devices within the performance report. Most businesses forget that the majority of their traffic is likely to be coming from mobile devices and that their mobile rankings will likely differ from their desktop rankings.”

“Within the performance report in Search Console, there is a Devices section where you can see which devices are driving the most traffic to your site.”

Hayden explains: “You can pull out some great reports from here that will really help show you if your SEO work is effective. For example, you should see a gradual increase in mobile traffic if your SEO is working.”

Related: A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Website Optimization

Prevent Keyword Cannibalization Issues

Keyword cannibalization is when the content on your site includes too many identical/similar keywords and leaves Google confused on which page to rank higher.

This can be a problem when a web page that you didn’t want to prioritize gets a higher ranking.

Here’s what Candour‘s Kiera Lavington says about this issue, “identify potential keyword cannibalization issues using the Performance Report by filtering to a target term with the Query filter. View the pages which rank for the selected term and then filter to compare the top 2 pages (by impressions) using “Compare” in the pages filter.”

“By using the “Impressions” or “Average Position” tab, you can see where pages dropped in and out of Google’s search results for the target term.”

“This will not be conclusive in identifying a cannibalization issue but will set you on your way if you can spot instances where one of the pages starting to rank causes the other page to drop,” Lavington continues.

“With further exploration, you can determine whether this is a cannibalization issue or not.”

Check the Canonical Domain Settings

The canonical domain is the domain version that stands as your preferred indexing version.

Google uses this information to penalize duplicate content and let the search engine know which domain you want indexed.

Voro’s Tomas Hoyos says you should “make sure to select the canonical domain you prefer within Google Search Console.”

“In other words, you should specify whether you prefer “”www”” in front of your domain name (e.g., www.voro.com), or not (e.g., voro.com).”

“f you don’t do this, Google might view the www and non-www versions of your domain as distinct, which means that you will divide credit for clicks, page views, backlinks, and engagement between two domains. This will hurt your SEO,” Hoyos explains.

Change Meta Tags and Monitor the CTR Impact

Meta tags are the text snippets that pop up below the article name and describe the content in that article.

They only appear in the page’s source code, not the page itself, and are mainly used for telling Google what the web page is all about.

These text snippets have a lot of influence on off-page SEO, which is why it’s recommended that you test different meta tags and see how they impact your overall CTR.

 “We always pay close attention to the CTR of our top keywords and pages,” says Sanitycheck‘s Nick Swan. “From our internal data, we have seen that when we consistently drive up our CTR, our rankings improve over time.”

“We update title tag and Meta descriptions each month and run tests to see if our new copy can improve our CTR. Just like we would test ad copy in Google Ads, it is critical to be running organic search snippet tests as well.”

Related: 18 Ways to Write a Perfect Meta Description to Boost Your CTR

Monitor High CTR Keywords and Optimize Content Around Them

By monitoring which keywords have a high CTR rate, you can pinpoint specific keywords worth optimizing for.

For instance, if you’re focusing on 2 different keywords on your website and one has a better CTR rate, it can become more favorable for your site even if it has a lower search volume compared to the other one.

That’s why Lynn Hericks of Intuitive Digital recommends “optimizing and expanding old blogs on your site by using keywords that are already working!”

“In the Performance section of Google Search Console, filter your queries by page to see what terms a blog already ranks for—find relevant keywords that rank on average in positions 8-20 (a term that you weren’t necessarily targeting directly, but your content still shows up for).”

“Now go back to edit your blog post and specifically use those terms to expand content for a rankings boost!” Hericks explains.

Pyxis Growth Partners’ Parker Short recommends using Google Analytics to find the pages that drive the most traffic to your site, then using Google Search Console to find the data you need to optimize those pages even further.

“Look to see what terms each page ranks for that are in positions #2-10 in search results and focus on those. Take those terms (if they’re relevant) and try to work them in naturally into the copy on that page.” 

“This is a great way to optimize historical blog posts that may pull in some organic traffic but are underperforming given the high quality of the content,” Short says.

Related: Blog SEO: 47 Expert Tips for Optimizing Blog Posts for SEO

Find Exploding Topics

Google Search Console can be used to spot upcoming trends. If you created a new category of product, or simply wrote a new article, use the Search Results performance report and filter your content to the most recent dates to see where new organic search traffic is landing.

You can also look at impressions, CTR, and average ranking to predict where traffic will soon be seen.

This information will allow you to audit that page’s keyword targeting, review the copy, improve internal navigation, and more.

TJ Kelly explains how they do this at RaySecur, Inc:

1. “Open your Performance Report
2. Navigate to the Pages tab
3. Sort by Impressions (high to low), to see which pages appear in SERPs the most
4. Click on one of your important/valuable pages
5. When the report refreshes, click the Queries tab
6. Edit the date scope and select Compare, then “Compare last 3 months to previous period”

Kelly explains: “You can now sort by Impressions, for both Last 3 Months and Previous 3 Months, to see which queries are driving more (or less) SERP impressions for a given page.”

“The key is to find Queries that appear high on the Impressions list for Last 3 Months, but did NOT generate as many impressions on Previous 3 Months—that may indicate the page ranking for new Queries, or that these new Queries are gaining search volume, and would therefore represent new traffic opportunities.”

“Bonus points if you export the report to a spreadsheet and calculate the change, then sort by change value. This shows the biggest movers (up or down) over time,” Kelly continues.

“Combine this insight with your Click numbers to see if the increased Impressions are translating to more clicks/traffic—an indication that your ranking is improving or maintaining—or, if Impressions went up, but Clicks did not, your positions may be falling.”

Related: 20 Ways to Fill Your Editorial Calendar with Highly Relevant Topics

Find Internal Linking Opportunities

Aside from checking the status of your links, you can also use Google Search Console to find suitable internal linking opportunities.

“The one tip I recommend is to use GSC to find pages that need internal linking,” says WPBeginner‘s Faizan Ali. “To find pages that need internal linking, click more under the top linked pages and then click on the internal links.”

Ali continues: “There are two main advantages of internal linking:

• They may help your new page get indexed faster.
• They will transfer PageRank to the new page, which may help it rank higher in the search results.”

“In order to find internal linking opportunities try this search operator “site:yourdomain.com ‘keyword you want to internal link,” Ali explains.

Based on the opportunities found, make sure you create repeatable internal linking strategies to ensure continual growth.

Compare Your Search Performance to Previous Periods

Web performance over a specific time period is one of the most important yet overlooked features in Google Search Console.

It can provide you with valuable insights into whether your SEO efforts are paying off or if you need a change of strategy.

Digital Debut‘s Deniz Doganay shares: “I really like to use the performance section to compare yearly quarter vs. quarter.

There are quite a few insights you can gather from this. Some being, checking rankings positions currently vs before, as well as clicks and impressions. It also gives you a good idea of your click-through rate.”

“Sure, you might have much better rankings now, and higher impressions but may notice that your CTR is a lot lower,” Doganay continues. “You then may need to work on your CTA’s or your meta title/descriptions or may even look into what you are doing on other channels to capitalize on these missed opportunities.”

PRO TIP: Looking for ways to track your organic search and learn which keywords and landing pages are ranking best? Learn how to use Google Search Console, Accuranker, and Databox to determine which topics and keywords you should focus on to improve your content marketing strategy.

Determine Which Pages Are Wasting Your Crawl Budget

Google doesn’t necessarily always crawl every page of your website. It sometimes establishes a crawl budget, limiting the number of pages of your site that it crawls regularly. 

This can be an issue because it could lead to new/updated content getting ignored by Google’s crawlers (i.e. your new/updated content won’t appear in search results).

For small sites, the crawl budget usually isn’t an issue. But if you have a site with thousands of pages of content, it can be. According to Google, “having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing.”

Indigoextra’s Martin Woods says that Google Search Console can help you find low-value pages that may negatively impact your crawl budget: “Google Search Console is very useful for finding the pages on your site that nobody visits anymore.”

To do this, look for pages that get the least number of impressions and clicks. Then, either delete them, 301 redirect them to pages that contain similar content, or update the content on the page to make it better.

“Studies have shown that if you delete pages with very little or no traffic—or 301 redirect them to better pages—Google will value the more relevant pages more. Overall, this substantially increases the traffic to your site as a whole,” Woods says.

Decrease Your Bounce Rate by Identifying Negative Keywords

“One advantage of using Google Search Console to see what keywords your site is ranking for is to identify negative keywords,” says Sam Makwana of Traffic Radius.

Negative keywords are queries that you’re ranking for but really shouldn’t be because your content doesn’t satisfy the user intent behind that keyword. According to Makwana, this can have a negative impact on your bounce rate. “With appropriate corrective measures, you will be able to decrease your bounce rate.”

One way to do this is to update the content to more appropriately address keywords you’re ranking for but haven’t really covered in your content. 

Another approach may be to create a new piece of content that does address the intent of a negative keyword, then link to that new post from the existing post that’s already ranking for the negative keyword.

Give Google More Information About Your Site without Adding Structured Data

Adding structured data to your site gives Google more information about your content. For example, you can use structured data to specify whether a piece of content is a general article, a list of FAQs, a recipe, a job posting, a review, and more. 

Structured data helps Google understand your content better and can result in expanded search result listings. For example, here’s a search result that contains structured data for both a recipe and ratings; both of these pieces of data lead to a more detailed search result:

But as Primitive Social’s John Hodge says: “Not all SEOs are experienced with web development, and sometimes even code-confident SEOs simply don’t have access to website code.” 

“With the data highlighter in Google Search Console, you can customize a site’s appearance on search result pages. This makes pages stand out, improves rankings, and gives more context to Google about your content.”

“Using the data highlighter makes it easy to tag different pieces of content on a website without adding structured data to your site code. Also, it’s super easy. All you do is select the item you’ll be highlighting (software, reviews, restaurants, etc.), enter the URL of the page, and start highlighting.” 

“When you highlight a piece of content, you can then specify more information about it, like if it’s a picture, an official URL, a download URL, and more.”

“Google ranks items based on contextual cues, and using the data highlighter is an efficient way to improve the context of your website content.

Related: The Best Structured Data Tools for SEOs and Content Marketers

Find FAQs in Google Search Console with RegEx

In 2021, Google Search Console started supporting RegEx in filters. 

This was received positively by Google Search Console users, as this new feature unleashes many opportunities to gather valuable data.

RegEx stands for “Regular Expression” and it’s basically a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern that can be used to check if a string contains a specified search pattern.

There are a lot of use cases for RegEx in Google Search Console, but one of the most useful is finding keywords that are related to different user search intent.

The eCommerce SEO expert Luca Mussari explains how:

1. Go to the “Performance” report
2. Add a filter by clicking on “New” next to “Date: the last 3 months”
3. Choose “Query”

4. In the dropdown you see, select “Custom (regex)”

5. Then select “Matches Regex” to find all the search queries containing one or more words from the RegEx formula.

6. Add the following RegEx based on the search intent you want to gather data from:

Navigational

.*yourbrandname.*

Informational

who|what|where|when|why|how|was|did|do|is|are|aren’t|won’t|does|if|can|could|should|would|won’t|were|weren’t|shouldn’t|couldn’t|cannot|can’t|didn’t|did not|does|doesn’t|does not|would not|wouldn’t|

Commercial

.*(best|compare|top|vs|review*).*

Transactional

.*(buy|cheap|affordable|price|purchase|order).*

Related: Useful Regex Codes for Google Analytics Reporting

Automate SEO Reporting with Databox

Determining indexed pages, finding quality links that improve your rankings, identifying the most popular keywords… Google Search Console is one hell of a free SEO tool to have at your disposal.

However, we won’t sugarcoat the fact it’s also probably one of the most difficult tools to learn the ropes of.

Even with so many valuable insights to extract, finding them and categorizing them can feel like going through a maze, not knowing which turn to make.

Not to mention that all the data is scattered across various tabs and queries, adding to the confusion even more.

But does that mean that you should give up on insights that could potentially skyrocket your SEO?

Absolutely not!

Instead, you should use dashboard software that makes understanding Google Search Console data and putting it to work a whole lot easier – enter Databox.

With Databox, you can connect your GSC account, drag and drop your most important metrics, and visualize them with a few clicks on a button – all in one dashboard.

You’ll be able to track all the crucial metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, and more in one place.

The process of building a dashboard literally takes minutes.

But, if even that doesn’t fit your schedule, you can always use our dashboard setup by contacting someone on our team and letting them know what you want out of your custom dashboard.

We’ll have it delivered as soon as in the next 24 hours.

Sign up for a free trial now and streamline your SEO reporting process with Databox.

The post How to Use Google Search Console for SEO: A Complete Guide appeared first on Databox.

You could be moving heaven and earth for your client, but if you don’t know how to present the relevant data, they won’t know whether their business is growing and at what pace.   

Or, as the American rock band Kansas would say, your SEO efforts will just be “dust in the wind”.

Luckily, SEO results are rather straightforward to measure and you have all the data needed to prove the value of your work right in your SEO analytics tools (from organic traffic and keyword rankings to average position, number of backlinks, and much more.)

But that’s just one part of the SEO reporting art.

Just pulling numbers from different tools isn’t enough – you need to know how to turn those numbers into insights. And that’s done by choosing the right amount of data, the right visualizations, and the right reporting format.

Lastly, SEO reporting should be done on a regular cadence. In fact, SEO tools are the most frequently used tools for monitoring and reporting performance, according to Databox’s State of business reporting.

Already feeling overwhelmed?

We got you.

Here is everything you need to know to build a consistent SEO reporting process and build SEO reports your clients will love. (For added context, we talked to 153 SEO agencies to learn how they do this and what works for them)

• What is an SEO Report?
• Understanding the Importance of SEO Reporting
• Most Important Metrics and KPIs to Include in an SEO Report (Recommended By Agencies and SEO Experts)
• Things You Must Do Before Building Your SEO Report
• How to Create an SEO Report in 6 Steps
• 9 Examples of SEO Reports You Can Build for Your Clients (with Templates)
• Streamline SEO Reporting Process with Databox

What is an SEO Report?

An SEO report is a concise summary of the most important SEO metrics that showcase a website’s performance.

They typically include crucial SEO metrics like backlinks, technical website health, click-through rates, keyword rankings, organic traffic, conversions, etc.

As Anastasia Kotsiubynska from SE Ranking emphasizes, “Make sure to choose the metrics that you’ve agreed upon with your client so as not to overload them with too much information.”

The main goal of an SEO report is to show your client the results of your SEO efforts and the impact your strategy is having on overall website performance.

At the same time, you can use this report to keep better track of what you’ve implemented and check how things are progressing.

While this might sound pretty straightforward and even a bit basic in theory, SEO reports are far trickier than they meet the eye.

Anyone can cough up a document with the basic Google Analytics/Ahrefs/Semrush SEO metrics in less than an hour and call it an SEO report.

But the trick is to create a clear overview of your most important metrics, show what progress has been made, explain the impact of your strategies, and provide recommendations for moving forward.

And this shouldn’t be a 50-page document either – just enough so all the actionable insights are presented in an easy-to-understand manner.

Incorporating elements from your marketing report into your SEO report can provide a more comprehensive view of your online performance. By combining SEO metrics with data on keyword performance, click-through rates, and conversions, you can offer your clients a well-rounded perspective on how your SEO efforts are contributing to their overall digital marketing strategy.

Related: Client Reporting 101: Tips and Best Practices for Agencies and Freelancers

Understanding the Importance of SEO Reporting

Unfortunately, there are a lot of SEOs that create SEO reports for the sole purpose of getting clients “off their backs”. This is a pretty uninspiring road to take.

The SEO report should be as valuable to the SEOs as they are to the clients and managers.

By mastering the art of SEO reporting, you’ll be able to:

• Better measure your SEO strategy efficiency
• Identify both positive and negative trends
• Pinpoint the areas that need to be optimized
• Understand what people are searching for and what problems they’re having
• Determine the website’s ROI
• Recognize which metrics you should focus on more

Related: Agency Reporting: 9 Tips to Effectively Prove Your Value to Clients

Most Important Metrics and KPIs to Include in an SEO Report (Recommended By Agencies and SEO Experts)

There’s no “one-size-fits-all” metrics checklist that you can use when devising your SEO report.

There are hundreds of SEO metrics you can include, so shortening the list down to a couple that you will include will mostly depend on what the goal is and what matters the most to your client.

If you overstep the line and add dozens of metrics, you’re not really helping your case, as the client will just get confused (even if they’re data literate).

With that said, there are a few SEO metrics that are a bit more equal than others and generally find their way onto an SEO report.

Organic Search Traffic

This is one of the most basic and telling SEO metrics you should include.

Organic search traffic is useful because it clearly showcases the efficiency of at least one area of your SEO strategy.

It shows the readers which pages are receiving the most organic traffic and which need to be improved moving forward.

If your SEO tool lets you segment traffic by country (Ahrefs e.g.), you can use that data as well, so the client has a better idea of where their product is the most successful.

Slawek Czajkowski of SurferSEO shares that it’s also crucial to explain organic traffic numbers to clients through comparisons:

“The traffic should be compared either with the previous month (for non-seasonal websites) or relevant to last year’s period (for seasonal businesses). Numbers, along with taken actions, should be explained comprehensively for the client, especially if the change in traffic was a succession of our SEO strategy.” 

Lastly, don’t forget to separately showcase unbranded traffic. Lincoln Rinehart of Adept Marketing emphasizes why this is important:

“A website will always rank highly for its own brand in organic search. SEO really can only impact unbranded searches, and unbranded searches are the main source of SEO traffic and lead growth.

For this data, I refer to Google Search Console. I exclude queries containing the brand name. On a regular basis, I also consult Google Analytics (GA4), Google Google Business Profile, and SEMrush.”

Given this usage, it’s no wonder why Google Search Console is the most popular SEO tool to pull data from:

Keyword Ranking

Display how many keywords the client’s website is ranking for, which keywords saw a boost in rankings, how search visibility changed, and the average keyword ranking position.

A good tip is to prioritize the keywords that you’ve determined are the most important for the client.

According to Bruce Hogan of SoftwarePundit, you can use this data yourself later on to “monitor the progress of your SEO efforts in improving your rankings, and quickly detect any negative impact of Google algorithm changes.” 

Again, you’ll want to create comparisons with historical data since that’s the best way to show your client exactly what’s changed since you took over.

“The best SEO reports aren’t just those that show SEO as a snapshot of a moment in time, but that show a historical trend to ensure that SEO rankings and overall performance are trending positively over a longer time horizon.”

Andrew Becks

Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer (CSIO) & Co-founder at 301 Digital Media

Want to get highlighted in our next report? Become a contributor now

Alistair Dodds of Ever Increasing Circles explained exactly which periods you should compare current performance against, based on the type of business:

“If the business you work for is seasonal, then ensuring you are comparing the results from the same month the year before is important. If your client is not seasonal, then you have the option of comparing to the previous month as well as updating your overall 6-month trend line.” 

Related: How to Build a Comprehensive SEO Keyword Ranking Report

Organic Conversion Rate

Your website can be as busy as a beehive, but if the bees aren’t buying any honey, all that traffic won’t make a difference.

So, make sure you separate traffic and conversions in your SEO report and also, define what exactly the desired conversion is for your client. While sales are one of the most frequent answers, it can also be anything from downloading a demo or filling out a form.

You can even get a bit more granular with this KPI by also including information like new visitor conversion rate, returning visitors conversion rate, cost per conversion, best converting pages, conversion by device and location, etc.

Jason Eland of Eland Consulting says that this is the metric clients care about the most since “traffic without conversions is just a vanity metric. The key here is contacts because you cannot control the client’s sales process. However, you can show and address the problem with conversion data.”

As it’s important to include data on conversions and lead generation in reports, implementing effective call tracking solutions can provide valuable insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns.

“We use CallRail for call tracking, UTM tags, Google Business Profile insights, Google Analytics events, and conversion tracking. You might not capture all conversions, but it is far better than not having any metrics.”

Piotr Olesson of Reef Digital seconds this and shares that conversion rates are “invaluable business information that provides insights into:

• Understanding how users are executing the desired action on a client’s website whether it’s a hard conversion (purchase) or a soft conversion (email sign-up) for example.
• Gaining insights into viewing which pages are driving the largest and lowest conversions.
• Understanding overall what type of conversions are best and least performing.
• Establishing potential ROI value based on marketing activity.
• Providing data that can be benchmarked against previous or future performance.”

PRO TIP: Learn how Help Scout improved its website conversion rate to increase demo requests by 56% and free trials by 6%.

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s main ranking signals, and as such, clients will want to check out how effective your link-building strategy has been.

Include how many new links the site acquired and make sure to mention the Domain Authority (DA) of the site that linked to you.

Make sure the clients understand that high-quality links are far more important than the number of acquired links.

If you aren’t using them already, consider trying out tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs since they provide the most granular backlink data.

Artem Klimkin of Linkshero explains that including backlinks in your SEO report will not only “create a bigger picture of your client’s optimization, but also give them insight into their organic presence elsewhere on the web.”

Here are the link-related details Klimkin includes in SEO reports:

• Source URL: This is the exact URL where the link you got for your client is located. It’s important for them for two reasons – authority and relevance.
• Target URL: This is the URL where that link actually points to. This is also a page you are trying to rank OR it’s a page that you are building links to so that you can pass on that link juice to a commercial page to bump it up in SERPs.
• Anchor Text: This is what that link you built actually says on the source URL. It can be anything between exact match keywords (really not the best idea these days) and a naked URL. Going with the brand name in the anchor text is also a good idea.
• Date Agreed & Date Live: Very often you are given a green light, but it actually takes some time before the link goes Live. That’s why we love keeping these two separate in order to see just how much time it takes us to get a link live. Sometimes it’s the same day. Sometimes is 2 months.
• DR/DA: What’s the weight of the site you got a link from? Write it in the report – it’s important for a basic understanding of the link value.
• Price: If you paid for a link (and I don’t judge you), how much was it? Put the price in that last column for accounting purposes.

Related: Link Building 101: The Ultimate Guide to Building Free Backlinks and Outranking Your Competitors

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) shows the quality of a website in the eyes of search engines and it’s directly linked to ranking.

You can include it to display how the client’s website quality has improved thanks to your SEO efforts and compare it with historical data.

What’s more, you can track your competitors’ DA scores and include that comparison in the report as well.

According to Dan Lacey, this metric is crucial to track because it captures so many different SEO areas under its umbrella.

“This is a number out of 100, which indicates how well your website is going to rank in search engines and takes multiple factors into account, such as your technical website setup, on-page optimization, and particularly your inbound link profile.

Every time your domain authority gets higher, the next number to reach gets harder, so it can be really difficult to achieve high numbers. Once you do achieve a high domain authority, everything else becomes much easier, including ranking your website highly for some popular keywords.

An added bonus is that it becomes much easier to persuade popular people in your industry to feature or guest post on your website if you have high domain authority, as linking to their website then gives them a very valuable backlink!”

Top Landing Pages

You’ve already covered how many visitors you’re generating (organic traffic), but where they’re going is just as important.

Reporting on top landing pages has now become standard practice among SEOs because it clearly showcases what’s working and what isn’t.

The landing pages that are the most successful usually have a few Easter eggs you can pick up on. Try to figure out what’s making them perform so well and then apply that to the landing pages that aren’t seeing too many visitors.

Search Optimism‘s Sam Olmsted explains how to find top landing page data: “In Google Analytics (GA4), filter your view to only see organic results. This allows you to block out traffic from ads or referrals. From there, look at your top-visited landing pages so you can see the first pages that visitors are getting to on your site.”

PRO TIP: How to Monitor and Evaluate Your SEO Performance

If you want to understand how your visitors are behaving on your landing pages, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console that will help:

• Organic clicks by queries. Which search queries generate the most clicks to your website?
• Organic clicks by page. Which pages receive the most clicks from search results pages?
• Organic sessions. How many organic search sessions does your website receive?
• Organic engaged sessions. How many website visitors were engaged with your content? An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.
• Views per channel. Which channels generate the most views to your website?

And more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our SEO and website conversion experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for monitoring your landing page performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Try this template

Things You Must Do Before Building Your SEO Report

As we said at the beginning, creating the perfect SEO report goes beyond just including the numbers.

Here’s what you have to do:

Define Goals

Before you start crafting an SEO strategy, you’ll need to talk with your client and see what goals they want to prioritize.

SEO covers a lot of areas and it’s impossible to deliver on all fields in a short time frame, especially if you’re creating reports on a monthly basis.

Organize a meeting with your client and make sure you understand what they’re trying to achieve in the foreseeable future. This can be anything from more organic traffic and conversions to better SERP rankings.

Some clients might ask for too much, and in these situations, you should explain the importance of focusing on just a few objectives at a time, or the strategy might blow up in your face.

While a lot of goals are interlinked and affect one another, that won’t always be the case. For instance, you could be targeting the wrong audience, which leads to zero conversions and brings down engagement.

Once you work out all the goal-related details, it’s time to develop your SEO strategy to reach it.

So, if they want more organic traffic, you’ll probably prioritize link building and rankings. Whatever it is, you’ll have a detailed plan on how to achieve the goal.

But when making your SEO report, make sure you only include the most relevant information. Clients typically only look for front-end data and how that strategy affects their objective. They don’t want to be bothered by what happens behind the scenes.

Aside from including what you plan to do, also emphasize the things you already did (e.g. on-page SEO, landing page optimization, links acquired, updating title tags and robot.txt, etc.)

You don’t have to go into much detail on these things, just frame it in a way that they see progress is being made.

Related: How to Set SEO Goals for Your Team (That Actually Drive Action) 

Determine KPIs to Track and Report on

This is another thing you’ll need to discuss with your client during the meeting.

In your SEO report, first list the KPIs they’ve expressed the most interest in and make sure to tell a story with the numbers.  

Simply throwing in a bunch of raw numbers with no context won’t help anyone and they will get the impression that you don’t know what you’re doing.

Also, don’t try to hide bad numbers or masquerade them as something else. SEO isn’t always rainbows and unicorns and certain fluctuations are completely understandable.

“One of the biggest SEO reporting problems is that “too many marketers focus on raw data that is often presented in a difficult-to-understand way”.

Clients usually have little to no marketing experience, so receiving a report without any sort of explanation can be frustrating.

It’s important to highlight the most important things about the report at the very beginning and explain what this means for your client’s business in simple terms. Go the extra mile by including an action plan for dealing with any issues and explore opportunities for improvement.”

Atanas Valchev

Director of Technical Support at Pixus

Want to get highlighted in our next report? Become a contributor now

Related: 9 Ways Agency Reporting Can Help Create Transparency with Clients and Boost Client Retention

Less (Metrics) is More

While your report should include a few more metrics besides the ones most important to your client, you shouldn’t go overboard.

Pick the KPIs that best showcase the progress toward a certain goal or can highlight the success you’ve seen so far with your strategy.

In general, the best practice is to include no more than 9 metrics in your report. Anything more than that can just overwhelm the client and leave them confused. 

Choose the Right Visualization

Aside from thinking about what data you’ll present, you should also focus on how you’ll present it.

This often gets overlooked by SEOs, but the visualization is just as important as the data itself. Visualizations help you make the numbers more actionable, simpler, and digestible.

Include charts and pies in your dashboard and pick some neutral colors to complement the data. Make sure there’s enough white space between the numbers and that everything’s laid out in an easy-to-understand manner.

Related: What’s the Best Chart Type for Your Dashboard Metrics?

Make Sure Your Client Understands the Report

At the end of the day, this is what matters the most in SEO reporting – whether your clients understand the report.

You can be acquiring backlinks like crazy, climbing the rankings, and driving more traffic, but if you don’t know how to communicate that data, you could end up losing the client.

The client is not an SEO expert, so make sure you’re explaining each term and number in plain English.

A good practice is to follow Einstein’s methodology – imagine you’re explaining it to a five-year-old!

Since it can sometimes be hard to step out of the “expert’s shoes” and identify what might be confusing, you can ask a friend or family member to take a look at the report.

Lastly, aside from making sure each metric is properly explained, Digital Quokka‘s Andy Chadwick adds that we shouldn’t forget to include “actions”.

“It’s all very well providing keyword ranking movements, increases/decreases in organic traffic, or errors that are in Search Console, but what good is the report if you don’t explain to your client the actions and insights off the back of them?

By including actions and insights off the back of your report, you are not only signifying to the client you know what you are doing, but you are being transparent as well as making it easier for yourself to prioritize and plan your own workload.”

Use an SEO Template

If there’s one tried-and-true way you can streamline your SEO reporting process, it’s to use an SEO template.

With most clients, you’ll be delivering SEO reports at least once a month, and doing it from scratch every single time will cost you a lot of hours.

SEO dashboard templates are one of the best solutions for organizing your data and customizing it to align with the client’s objectives.

Databox’s template gallery has 100+ SEO templates at your disposal, each containing dozens of prebuilt SEO metrics from the most popular SEO analytics tools, like Google Analytics (GA4), Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush, and more. Thanks to our robust connections with Google Sheets and Excel, you can also easily connect any spreadsheet.

By using one of our SEO templates, building a report will literally take you a few minutes. Just plug in your data and watch how the metrics populate on the dashboard.

How to Create an SEO Report in 5 Steps

Now that we’ve covered the pre-building preparation, let’s move on to the exact step-by-step guide that you can follow in Databox to create a professional and digestible SEO report.  

1. Create a Client Account
2. Connect Your Data Sources
3. Create a New Report
4. Customize Your Report
5. Share the Results with Your Client

1. Create a Client Account 

Firstly, you should head over to the “Agency Accounts” > “Client Page” > “+ New Client” to open up a new Client Account.

The best practice is to create a separate account for each of your clients since this lets you efficiently organize the data and later customize it.

Plus, you won’t have to worry about mixing up their documents or misplacing some numbers.

2. Connect Your Data Sources

Organizing and categorizing your client’s data is one of the most tedious parts of the process, especially if you use several SEO tools to track performance.

Not with Databox.

You can connect 130+ data sources, including the most popular tools like Google Analytics (GA4), Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc.

To do this, open your Client Account and go to “Data Manager” > “+ New Connection”.

3. Create a New Report

Now that you have your data sources included in the Client Account, it’s time to start building the report and adding the metrics.

You can use the Wizard and click on “Blank Databoard” if you want to build your report from scratch and already have specific metrics in mind.

Go to “+ New Databoard” > “Use Wizard” and then select the data source and metrics you want to include.

Or, you can use a template from the “Public Template Library” for additional guidance and speed up the process a bit. Different templates include different metrics, but you can customize them as you move forward.

4. Customize Your Report

SEO reports created in Databox are fully customizable and you can modify them until they fit your client’s goals and expectations.

Once you go through the basics of connecting a data source and adding the metrics, you can later resize the datablocks, change the layout, and try out different visuals. Rearrange the elements until you get the SEO report you have in mind.

5. Share the Results with Your Client

Lastly, you’ll want to share that awesome report you created with your clients.

There are a few different ways you can share your results, including:

• Scheduled Snapshots
• Shareable Link
• Stream to TV (in a conference room e.g.)

You can find these options once you click on the “Share” button in the Designer.

9 Examples of SEO Reports You Can Build for Your Clients (with Templates)

That piece of paper where you outlined your client’s needs and objectives – you’ll need to pull it out one more time.

You can easily find tons of different SEO report templates, but you should always go with the one that best matches your client’s goals and reporting schedule.

Generally, the best practice is to create SEO reports on a monthly basis – it’s not too frequent so that tiny details can disrupt the process and not too rare so you end up overlooking certain aspects.

In our survey, more than half of our respondents shared that they create SEO reports on a monthly basis.

With that said, let’s go through some of the most popular SEO report templates and see what you can present and emphasize with them.

1. SEO Overview Report
2. Site Audit Report
3. Organic Traffic and Engagement Report
4. Organic Conversions Report
5. Site Ranking and Keyword Performance Report
6. Backlink Analysis Report
7. Content Performance Report
8. Website Speed Performance Report
9. Local SEO Report

SEO Overview Report

As the name suggests, this report is designed to give your client’s a detailed overview of your SEO efforts and how they’ve affected the overall performance.

It helps you keep track of the most popular SEO metrics like keyword rankings, organic sessions, ranking distribution, average search position, backlinks, and much more.

Here’s an SEO Overview report example from our gallery that pulls data from Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, SEMrush and Moz.

You can download this template and answer some common client questions like:

• How many new backlinks have you acquired?
• Are you generating high-authority backlinks?
• What is the website’s spam score?
• What are the website’s Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA)?
• Which keywords do you rank for?
• What’s your organic click-through rate (CTR)?

Site Audit Report

The site audit report is an ideal choice if you want to highlight the website’s health and performance to the client (and get better insights yourself).

It helps you track website crawlability, HTTPS implementation, indexing, internal linking, errors and warning, and more.

With these things in one place, you’ll be able to quickly diagnose any issues and share recommendations on how to proceed with your clients.

You can create a Site Audit report like this one in Databox in just a few minutes. This report pulls data from Semrush, but you can replace it with an SEO tool of your choice.

You can use it to answer questions such as:

• What’s the website audit score?
• How many pages were crawled last month?
• How many page issues were there during the previous site audit?
• What is the total number of diagnosed issues?

Organic Traffic and Engagement Report

This type of SEO report is popular among clients since the metrics it showcases are pretty straightforward and easy to read.

Plus, it displays whether organic traffic and overall engagement have improved since you’ve taken over.

It typically includes metrics such as bounce rate, average time on page, number of unique visitors, goal conversion rate, returning visitor percentage, and more.

The things you’ll clients will learn are:

• Which search queries drive the most organic traffic to the website?
• How many unique organic visitors are you generating?
• Which landing pages drive the most organic traffic?
• Which devices do organic visitors use?
• How many organic sessions are you generating?

Here’s an example of an Organic Traffic and Engagement report in Databox you can test out during the trial and keep it for free later.

Organic Conversions Report

We already talked about organic conversions as one of the most important SEO metrics, and clients will sometimes ask you to emphasize it in the report. 

Since more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more conversions, this report can show them whether they’re targeting the right audience.

Also, they’ll get granular insights into KPIs like new/returning visitor conversion rate, top converting pages, cost per conversion, conversion by location, and more.

Here’s an Organic Conversion report example that our clients use to stay on top of their conversion metrics, in one place.

Site Ranking and Keyword Performance Report

If your client wants to focus on improving their SERP rankings, you should go with this type of SEO report since it provides the most concise overview of rankings and keyword performance.

With metrics like average search position, impressions, clicks, and keyword rankings, you’ll provide them with a clear overview of how they’re currently ranking on Google and pinpoint areas that you’ll optimize.

And, if you use software that displays changes in real-time, the client will also be able to monitor significant fluctuations, specific page search positions, and see how many search queries each position group receives.

Here’s one of our Site Ranking and Keyword Performance report examples you can download while trialing and further customize. This report uses data from Google Search Console.

Backlink Analysis Report

Backlink reports demonstrate the efficiency of your link building strategies and provide all the necessary insights the client needs to understand the big picture.

Some of the most common metrics included are referring pages, domain rating, new backlinks acquired, the total number of backlinks, the number of do-follow links, and more.

In essence, this SEO report answers questions like:

• What’s the website’s backlink profile strength?
• How many backlinks does the website have?
• How many referring domains are linking to the website?
• Is the domain rating increasing over time?
• What’s the quality of the websites that are linking back?

You can create this SEO report in no time by downloading our Backlink Analysis report template and customizing it according to your metrics and data. This report uses data from Ahrefs.

Content Performance Report

Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand — the more efficient your SEO strategy is, the better your content will perform, and vice versa. And by using a content performance report, you can track exactly how the content you are creating performs and report it in a straightforward manner to your clients.

Most SEOs include Google Analytics metrics like pageviews, sessions, audience behavior, events by events action, goal completions, etc.

Overall, it’s a useful report if your clients want to gain an overview of traffic and conversions, audience behavior and trends, and other content-related insights.

Here’s one example of how this SEO report should look like:

You can download this Content Performance report and customize it with your data in a matter of minutes.

Website Speed Performance Report

A lot of SMB business owners require insights into site speed and ask SEOs to provide them with website speed performance reports.

The reasons are pretty clear – as site speed directly affects user experience, it also affects your conversion rates, traffic, and SERP rankings.

If your site takes forever to load, you’ll end up losing a visitor that could’ve even been a customer.

A website speed performance report can be extremely useful in helping your pinpoint broken pages and areas that need to be optimized.

In most cases, the report includes metrics like pageviews, bounce rate, average page load time, and page load time by device.

Here’s a website Speed Performance report example from our gallery:

You can pull your own metrics data to this template and learn things like:

• Which pages have the fastest/slowest load time?
• What is the average page load time for each device?
• How is the load time affecting the bounce rate?
• Are you losing visitors due to slow page load times?

Local SEO Report

Lastly, if you’re doing business with a local client, you’ll probably need to create a local SEO report at some point in your collaboration.

A local SEO report typically focuses on Google Business Profile data such as phone calls, actions, reviews, etc.

Here are some of the questions it can answer:

• How many customers are finding the business via search?
• How many users are contacting the business directly from GMB?
• Is the Google local ranking improving over time?

These SEO reports might take up a lot of time to create – unless you download our free Local SEO report template.

In just a few minutes of customization, this is how your report could look like:

Streamline SEO Reporting Process with Databox

If this isn’t your first rodeo with SEO reporting, then you’re already familiar with the tedious and time-consuming process of *shivers* manual reporting.

You first have to go through every SEO tool you’re using individually, adjust the time frame, and collect the most important KPIs and metrics — from more than one tool.

Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz…

If you are not taking screengrabs, you are probably downloading data into spreadsheets and then figuring out how you’re going to transport that data onto another spreadsheet after you filter it in the first one.

Once you finally pinpoint which data to include, you have to make it understandable and insightful through visualizations, columns, the right fonts, a proper layout, etc.

You then realize that your report looks like a Picasso painting. You probably hire a designer to “make it beautiful”.

Lastly, you turn the report into a PDF and forward the report to your client… and repeat the same process over and over again, each month or maybe even each week.

Why go through all this trouble when you can automate the entire process with an SEO reporting tool like Databox?

Databox transforms hours-long processes into a few minutes of reporting magic.

Here’s how easy it is to create an SEO report in Databox:

1. Connect your data source (130+ integrations)
2. Pull out the metrics your client is interested in
3. Visualize the metrics and organize the report in a few clicks

That’s really it, no hidden steps in between.

Once you wrap up the report, you can immediately share it with your client (or the entire team) and the numbers will be updated in real-time. So even if they don’t check it out right away, you won’t have to make any manual changes.

And, if your deadline is near and you have your hands full with other things, you can always contact our team for a free dashboard setup. Just tell them what you want them to include and you’ll receive the report in less than 24 hours.

The best of all? Streamlining and automating your SEO reporting process is just a free trial away.

The post How to Create an SEO Report for Your Client in 2025 appeared first on Databox.

Aggregate data is helpful, but we know you need to dig deeper to really understand what’s working and what needs optimizing.

If you’re using Google Search Console with Databox, now you can dig deeper into your metrics using Query Builder.

By using fine-tuned data filtering, you can dig deeper into your data and create custom metrics that provide the insights that you need. 

This is what our new Google Search Console Query Builder for Databox offers you.

Using Query Builder for Google Search Console

Now, you can create Custom Metrics for:

1. Impressions
2. Clicks
3. CTR
4. Average Position
5. Number of Queries on Position
6. Number of Queries on Position Group

And, filter those custom metrics by the following dimensions:

1. Country
2. Device
3. Page
4. Query
5. Search Appearance

You can also pull data using an additional layer of filtering by Google Search results types, including Image, News, Video, and Web.

This flexibility enables you to get far more focused results when it comes to exploring and presenting Google Search Console data in Databox metrics and dashboards. 

How to access the Query Builder for Google Search Console 

To access the Google Search Console Query Builder in Databox, navigate to  Metrics > Query Builder. Click the green + Create Custom Metric button and select your connected Google Search Console Account from the Data Source drop-down list.

The Google Search Console Query Builder is now available in the Databox Performer and Professional plans. You can request a trial of Query Builder by following the steps listed here. 

New to Databox? Start by creating your free account.

The post New: Create Custom Metrics from Google Search Console in Databox appeared first on Databox.

Undoubtedly, you can learn a lot about how your website is doing in the Google search results and what you can do to improve it with filters in Google Search Console. But, if you don’t know which filters to apply, you’re actually missing out on a lot.

This is why we’ve put together this post on ways you can filter data. We’ve covered the basics of setting up filters too. Here’s a bird’s eye view of what you’ll learn today:

• What is Google Search Console Filters?
• How to Set Up Google Search Console Filters?
• 22 Ways to Use Google Search Console Filters to Filter Data

What is Google Search Console Filters?

The filters you set up in Google Search Console to sift through data and your performance are Google Search Console Filters. These help you group data, so it’s easy to analyze and understand how you’re doing.

For instance, you can filter data based on the branded keywords they contain. By applying the filter, you can see pages containing branded keywords in a jiffy instead of keeping a manual record of pages that include branded keywords.

The good news is that there are tons of filters you can use in Google Search Console.

As Robin Madelain of Etias-Europe points out, “While filtering the data and pages on Google Search Console, you have to know that there are various kinds available for your use. You can filter your searches according to images, videos, articles, news, etc. You can also filter by dimensions such as country, ISO code, page, device, etc. After selecting the dimension, you can filter via four operators: contains, equals, does not equal, dos not contain.”

Wondering why you need these filters?

The short answer: to analyze data and see how you’re performing in the Google search results.

Sky Alphabet Social Media’s Steve Yanor elaborates, “Because of Google algorithm updates and, increasingly, patches Google applies to its own algorithm, it is very important to look back every 28 days at your impressions and click data in Google Search Console (GSC).

This means that you’ll want to compare the current 28-day period (which is not the default; 90 days is the default) with the prior 28-day period. This way, you can see the effects (if any) that various SEO implementations have on certain keywords. Instead of cutting and pasting, use Databox to export the data or publish it to a dashboard as part of your monthly report. You don’t even have to open GSC!”

Editor’s note: Struggling to switch between various screens to monitor your performances? Get a full picture of your Google performance, including an overview of how your top keywords perform with this free Google Analytics – Basics dashboard.

How to Set Up Google Search Console Filters?

For setting up a filter in Google Search Console Filter, you need to add three variable:

• Dimension name: This is the value that you want to filter. The dimensions you can filter are country (specify country by 3-letter country code), device (choose from desktop, mobile, and tablet), page (by adding a specific URL string), and query (by adding a specific query string).
• Operator: This indicates whether you want the specified value to match the dimension value. To indicate your preference, choose from the following four options: contains (the value must contain or be equal to your value), equal (the values should be an exact match), nonContains (the value must not contain the expression), and nonEquals (the values need not be exact matches).
• Expression value: Lastly, the expression value is the value for the filter to match or exclude according to the operator. For country dimension, this must be a 3-letter country code. For query and page dimensions, the expression value can be any string, such as any keywords or page URL on your website. As for the device dimension, there are three supported values: mobile, desktop, and tablet.

Here’s an example filter: query contains desktop use

In this case, ‘query’ is the dimension name, ‘contains’ is the operator, and ‘desktop use’ is the expression value. 

Editor’s note: This free Improve Your Google Search Position dashboard template allows you to track the average Google search position by page on your website and see which ones can be boosted to page one of Google.

22 Ways to Use Google Search Console Filters to Filter Data [Plus 4 Bonus Tips]

Now that you know what Google Search Console filters are and how to set one up, let’s show you some ways to filter pages and data that about 40 of our expert contributors shared with us:

1. Use the URLs containing filter
2. Use the exact URL filter
3. Filter using branded and non-branded keywords
4. Use the queries report
5. Use the query filter to find keywords
6. Set the filter to show zero internally linked pages
7. Make the most of the date function filter
8. Use the country data Google Search Console Filter
9. Filter by page
10. Filter by query and page
11. Use the current ranking keywords filter
12. Use the filter page and keyword data
14. Filter by brand name queries
15. Filter with landing page URL
16. Filter page data
17. Use the compare filter
18. Filter by query with the most impressions
19. Exclude all branded keywords’ variations
20. Filter through keywords via organic search volume
21. Filter pages by impressions
22. Filter for average position

PRO TIP: How to Analyze Your Best Pages for SEO Performance

To optimize your website for organic search, you probably use Google Search Console to learn which pages receive the most impressions and clicks, and which queries are driving them. Now you can quickly assess your SEO performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, including:

1. Which search queries drive traffic to my website?
2. Which of my website pages generate the most impressions and clicks in search engines? 
3. What’s the average click-through rate (CTR) for our website pages in search?
4. What’s the average position our website pages show up in search results?
5. How many clicks have our website pages generated in search results this month?

and more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Search Console experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring organic search performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up this Google Search Console Dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Search Console account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Try this template

1. Use the URLs containing filter

One effective filter to use in Google Search Console is the URLs containing filter. For example, SoftwarePundit’s Bruce Hogan shares, “One of the page filters we use most commonly is the ‘URLs containing’ filter. This allows us to look into performance for entire categories of pages, rather than individual pages or the site as a whole.”

Iskra Evtimova uses the same filter. Evtimova writes: “What helps me analyze the keywords and improve the website’s performance in Google search is to filter by page URL. This way, I can see the position, CTR, impressions, and clicks for a particular page.

I look for relevant keywords with good search volume and buy intent, located on the second or bottom of the first page. Then, I just give them a little push. After all, it is better to work with keywords that are already performing well than to optimize random ones that may take ages to rank blindly.”

Derin Oyekan from Reel Paper adds more: “The tool for URL Inspection allows you to examine individual URLs. To see if there are variations, you pull the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it resides now on your site.

More technical details, such as when and how Google crawled it and how it looked when it was crawled, can also be found on this page. You may also find a lot of mistakes occasionally. This could be in terms of Google not being able to browse your website properly. It also provides the structured data contained on this URL with details.”

2. Use the exact URL filter

“An extremely helpful filter on Google Search Console is the ‘Exact URL’ page filter,” comments 1Dental’s Aaron McWilliams. “When using this filter, you can differentiate between your local organic clicks to a page and general organic clicks to a page. It is extremely helpful to see what keywords are ranking well on a smaller, more localized scale. This can help you modify your SEO strategy on a local level and give you the upper hand over your competitors.”

Related: 100+ Experts On How to Use Google Search Console for SEO in 2020

Pir Fahad Momin from Slyecom suggests, “The ONE way to filter your keyword and/or page data in Google Search Console to discover important insights is to track the performance of local keywords.

You can add a URL query to the primary website field within Google My Business. Afterwhich, use GSC to see what keywords people use to find and click local results. Use the ‘Exact URL’ page filter in GSC to differentiate a page’s standard organic clicks against its local organic clicks. This method provides information on granular search terms that can be used to increase local SEO efforts.”

3. Filter using branded and non-branded keywords

Another filter to consider is “using Google Search Console for branded vs. non-branded keywords,” shares Juliette Tholey of Juliette Tholey SEO Consulting.

“Just navigate under ‘Performance on Search results’ and then add a new filter ‘Query’, ‘Queries containing’ or ‘Queries non-containing,’ and the name of your brand. Segmenting your organic traffic into branded and non-branded categories can help you better understand your site’s SEO performance.”

4. Use the queries report

“In Google Search Console, there are various ways to discover important insights about your website performance, keywords, and page data. One of the most important filters available is the queries report under the performance section,” notes Efferent Media’s Joe Czarniecki.

“In this report, you can see the top queries/keywords that your website has shown up for on the Google SERPs, as well as the top queries/keywords that lead people to click through to visit your website,” explains Czarniecki.

“This has helped me over the years to highlight which keywords are driving the most traffic to my clients’ websites and, thus, continue to optimize for these keywords and interlink them with other important pages.”

Czarnieckiadds, “This simple yet important feature allows marketers to identify and optimize the content and keywords on their website(s) that are driving a high level of traffic and, ultimately, turn these visitors into conversions. Not only can you see all this information, but you can also sort the information by date range, which has helped me to measure performance over longer time periods.”

Kinsta‘s Sam Gooch lays out their process using this filter: “To quickly identify low hanging fruit, head over to the ‘Search Results’ report in Google Search Console:

• Set the date range to cover at least the last few months.
• Select all 4 metrics above the graph, then click the ‘Queries’ tab from the table below and
• Filter the selection to show: Impressions greater than 1000 (you can tweak this depending on how much volume there is in your industry), Click-through rate (CTR) lower than 10, and position lower than 5 (again, you might want to play with these numbers).

This will give you a list of top-ranking keywords that are frequently searched but where your page isn’t getting the clicks it deserves. A quick analysis of the other results in the SERP can help you to craft a more click-worthy ad, based on the title tag and meta description.”

ExaWeb Corporation uses filter by query too. Their team’s Patrick Garde says, “We filter our keywords by Query, ‘Contains’ & ‘Does not contain’ plus our brand name to understand the breakdown of brand vs. non-brand searches. If you want to reveal the visibility of your SEO campaign, you should exclude impressions and clicks from your brand name.

This filter helped us see stats from our non-branded searches. From there, we were able to find opportunities where we could still improve. For example, it can show you which keyword is getting the most impressions, and you can tweak your campaign to add or incorporate the keyword in your content.”

5. Use the query filter to find keywords

“One of my favorite functions of Google Search Console, as an SEO and writer, is the Queries filter in Performance,” Firewire Digital’s Shonavee Simpson-Anderson shares.

“This is where you can see the keywords users have searched in Google and that your business, service or products have appeared for in the search results. You can see this represented by Impressions, and you can see the number of clicks to your website as well.”

Simpson-Anderson continues, “I use this filter to identify two types of keyword opportunities: To find keywords that work, i.e., keywords I am already using on the website that can be optimized further. If the site is already being served up to users searching for a keyword or phrase I am already using, I can go back to that content, update it or produce new content that targets the keywords I know are working.

To find new keywords. This filter is great for finding keywords that aren’t part of your content strategy and absolutely should be – because users are already founding you for them. If you have keywords popping up in this Queries filter that are relevant to you, but you haven’t utilized them consciously or strategically in your content, this is your opportunity to do so. This is great for optimizing existing content or producing new content.

Using this filter can also help you identify potential pain points in your content or site. If there is a keyword in the queries list you are using in your strategy, and it has a ton of impressions but a really small click-through rate, you need to think about why.

Why are thousands or tens of thousands of users searching this phrase, seeing your page in the search results, and NOT clicking on it? This is an optimization opportunity. Look deeper into the content you’re using to target this keyword – is the right content showing for that query? Does that page have a high exit or bounce rate? Can you see any pain points on the page? What CTA’s are you using? What does your microcopy say to users? Be thorough, optimize, and monitor for any improvements.”

On the other hand, Mason Hunt from Savvy Doggo shares, “I use this [query filter on the performance tab.] to measure the click-through rates of similar queries with different intents. Recently I discovered that my click-through rates were noticeably better on my informational queries than my commercial ones. This led me to compare the meta descriptions on these posts and make systematic adjustments to all commercial content.”

Related: 14 Free Ways to Research and Analyze Keywords for Blog Posts

6. Set the filter to show zero internally linked pages

This is another useful filter. Nikola Roza of Nikola Roza- SEO for the Poor and Determined elaborates, “One useful way for me is to find orphaned pages on my blog. Or pages that are severely under-linked. I go to Links > Internal Links report to find them, and then I set a filter to show me pages with zero internal links pointing to them.

I also set the filter for pages that have <3 internal links. This has helped me a lot because a page that’s not linked to anywhere is as good as invisible.

And pages that have only 1-2 internal links pointing to them are not significantly better off.

Optimal internal linking is a powerful SEO lever to pull for any website, and I’ve definitely seen movement in the SERPS when I fed my malnourished pages with some extra internal link equity.”

Related: How to Use Internal Links to Boost SEO and the User Experience

7. Make the most of the date function filter

Education Advocates’ Lynell Ross talks in favor of this Google Search Console Filters.

“Honestly, one of the most important filters we use when analyzing our page data in search console is the date function. We look at changes in our data on a day-to-day basis, and the date filter helps us zero in on recent trends. We want to see which keywords are getting the most traffic and which of our pages are getting the most hits,” outlines Ross.

“Having the most recent data regarding trends is crucial to know where to place resources. You don’t want to look at a big window of data; zero is on recency through the date filter.”

8. Use the country data Google Search Console Filter

“One simple thing that is easily forgotten is to filter your reports to exclude data from countries that are not your target market,” points out Jellyfish Training’s Chris Hutty.

“To do this, use the ‘Countries’ tab to select the country that is relevant for your web property. This filters out a lot of noise in your data. Your pages will often rank in other countries, although probably not as well as in your target market. This will skew your data, particularly when you’re looking at your impressions, click-through rates, and average ranking positions.

If you’re a global brand, with different subfolders on your site targeting different countries, you need to create separate GSC profiles for each country folder to do this effectively.”

Daniel Cheung of Make SEO Simple Again adds, “Make sure that you’re looking at the correct country! Or, at the very least, filter out country data that will skew your insights as you may be targeting just one geographical location. By doing this, you can have a clearer picture of how content is performing on a page-level (e.g., looking at specific queries and average position trend across time).”

9. Filter by page

“One of my most useful ways to filter GSC data is to look at pages, not queries, then compare this week to the week before and filter by the difference,” shares Jump’s Lawrence Calman-Grimsdale.

“That way, you can see which of your pages are the biggest improvers/losers. This is essential for us as we currently have over 12k jobs on the platform, and I want to know why some are more popular than others.”

For example, Vlad Seman from Blocshop uses the filter keywords by page filter. “When you get that view,” Seman comments, “it often surprises you on which keywords you rank for without trying (only by covering a topic). I use it to go back to the article and update it – when I see an interesting keyword, I add an extra paragraph talking about the topic.”

Daniel Reeves of Dandy Marketing applauds this filter too. “One of the best ways I use Google Search Console is also one of the simplest. I use this method for individual pages that I want to optimize or refresh to hopefully get a nice little ranking boost.

• Step 1: Open the search results performance report.
• Step 2: Add a new filter for ‘Page’ and enter the exact URL you want to look at
• Step 3: Review search terms that are currently driving traffic to that page
• Step 4: Add CTR and Average position

Once you have done step 4, you should now see all the search terms currently driving traffic to that page. You can now use this data to review your page title and try to optimize it better, looking at average position data and CTR.

You should also be able to do some quick manual checks to see if your page headings are optimized correctly, or even spot if additional sections need adding or building out more based on queries that are in low positions with low CTR.”

Lastly, Laughing Samurai’s Laurence Williams says, “We recommend filtering search queries by page using the sub-categories for their blog.

This allows us to see the performance of keywords related to the categories of content written on their site. We can then monitor improvements over time for different categories of content, which search queries have been triggering those improvements, and determine what kind of content they should improve upon going forward.”

10. Filter by query and page

“Google often holds back from ranking more than one of your optimized pages for competitive keywords to help maintain fairness across websites in the search results page,” IndeJuice’s George Muharib says.

“The below steps will help you to identify internally competing pages that may be conflicting and holding back your rankings. With over 7,000 Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.products on our custom-built marketplace platform, we are no strangers to the confusion and difficulties Google faces in ranking the correct page for SEO.

Google has a very powerful filter within the Google Search Console that we use to discover important insights into whether Google is ranking the correct page.

To use this tool, simply:

1. Click on the ‘Performance’ tab;
2. Hit the ‘+ New’ button to add a new filter, select ‘Query’ and enter the relevant keyword; and
3. Hit the ‘+ New’ button to add a further filter, select ‘Page’ and enter the relevant page URL.

The resulting screen will show you your Google performance (impressions, clicks, average position, etc.) over the last 3 months against the keyword and page you have identified.

By following these steps against any internally competing pages, you will be able to see which pages need to be further optimized and which need to be de-optimized to achieve your ranking goals for the relevant pages.”

11. Use the current ranking keywords filter

Brad McHargue of Portent, Inc. suggests this filter. “If I’m trying to optimize a single page, I’ll use the current ranking keywords to find optimization opportunities. If it’s ranking in the top ten, I’ll put more effort into optimizing for that term. It’s simple, but it’s one of the first places I go when doing any sort of optimization for a single page.”

12. Use the filter page and keyword data

Matt Arceneaux of SocialChimp Social Media says, “One way I filter page and keyword data in Search Console to discover important insights is to compare, in three month periods, the largest gains and losses in average position.

For example, if the keyword ‘social media for real estate agents’ improves from a position of >1000 to 154 over a 3-month period, it’s a sign that there’s momentum that should be leveraged to amplify the corresponding page further.”

Related: 29 Ways to Improve Your Search Position in Google Search Results

13. Filter by specific web page

“Filtering query data for a specific webpage gives valuable insight into a page’s performance,” notes Melanie Musson of CarInsuranceCompanies.net. “If our site is showing up for non-relevant keywords, we know we need to examine our keywords and make sure we’re using the ones that target relevant queries.”

The Marketing Introvert lays out the action step for this: “It’s a simple 3-step process:

• Find the page you want to improve — login to GSC, go to Performance, click on Pages, find the individual page you want to improve, then click on it. This will filter the data to show for only that page.

• Find the queries/keywords with high impressions but low click-through rate — click on the Queries tab, click on all the metrics to show them, then apply some filters. I like to go for quick win keywords, meaning those that only need a little bump to get me the most results.

• Filter position lower than 16 (top of page 2). [Next] Filter CTR lower than 5% (play around with this to get the right data; every page/query is different). Sort by impression. Improve the page using the keywords/queries you find — take the data you gathered and add it to your page. Note that this isn’t simply stuffing the keywords there. Sometimes, you might have to rewrite several sections or add new ones you might have missed.

Follow this tactic, and you’ll find that those keywords will eventually get higher positions and clicks, which ultimately leads to more traffic for your website. I recommend doing this every quarter.”

14. Filter by brand name queries

Here’s another way to use Google Search Console filters: “Filter out your brand name queries to see how your website’s non-brand SEO is performing,” highlights Accredited Debt Relief‘s, Sean Myers.

“Then work to identify the queries that rank outside of the top 10 but have strong impressions, as these are your next page one contenders. Focus on developing additional content to help rank for these queries and watch as the traffic flows in.”

15. Filter with landing page URL

For this filter, we have a case study from Ali Silat from The Jacket Maker, who writes, “The idea was to optimize the landing page for a search query that leads to maximum clicks or conversions. It helped us improve the rankings of our leather jackets page.”

Here’s what they did: “We reverse-engineered Google Search Console data and found original search queries that lead to maximum clicks or conversion.

• We used the Multichannel report in Google Analytics to find the landing pages with high conversions, filtered data with last-click or direct conversions metric to see the exact date when maximum conversions happened.
• In the Search Console performance report, we filtered it with a landing page URL and headed toward queries to see which query got high clicks and impressions. Usually, Google blocks it, and it doesn’t show clicks if we filter data with an exact match URL, so it’s better to look for URL in the pages tab.

With a data-driven approach, we have improved rankings for our page leather jackets for men.”

Editor’s note: The Google Analytics Landing Page SEO dashboard template allows you to track the strength of your on-page SEO by showing you which pages on your website drive the most organic clicks, sessions, and more.

16. Filter page data

“Filtering page data in the performance tab of Google Search Console is an amazing way to detect the customer’s search intent,” shares GetSpace. Digital’s Rebeca Sena.

“By going to the performance tab and filtering out target countries below the main graph, we can select a top-performing page. Then, we can visualize the list of queries that led to display that page in the search results.

For my clients, it’s been particularly useful for discovering the language of their customers. While the number of impressions corresponds with relevancy to search queries (evaluated by Google’s algorithms), the CTRs indicate the relevancy to the people behind the searches.”

17. Use the compare filter

“One of the best features in Google Search Console is the compare filter,” opines Kaitlyn Short of Best Company. “Every quarter, I will filter my pages with the ‘3 months compare’ tool. I then select ‘clicks’ and ‘the difference’ to narrow down my search. This helps me see which keywords or pages have had a significant drop in clicks.

Using that information, I make a plan for which pages I will optimize during the upcoming quarter. I also compare results with Google Trends to see if any topics are trending higher or lower than usual.”

18. Filter by query with the most impressions

“In your performance report, you can sort keywords and pages by impressions,” recommends Triffid Swim’s Emily Amor. “Now compare this data to the click-through rate. If you see a page with high impressions but a relatively low click-through rate compared to other pages, you can get a pretty good idea of what keywords and pages are gaining momentum and have high search potential, but you’ve yet to capitalize on fully.

You can export this report and start working on optimizing those pages with these keywords to bolster your organic performance. I do this regularly to help me gauge what pages I should be focusing on more to improve.

Digital Dynamo’s Marcie Lord also speaks in favor of this filter: “Here is one method I have found to be extremely beneficial for improving SEO – You want to filter by the queries that had the most impressions, then look through those to see which ones had the lowest CTR (clickthrough rate).

Anything below 2% is considered low, and below 1% would be extremely low. You will start to see a trend – typically, the queries with high impressions and low CTR are related, and they are all related to one page on your site. This usually means your site is ranking well in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for a particular topic, but your title tag and meta tag for the ranking page do not entice people to click through.

To help your CTR for those related terms, it would be advised that you write a title tag and meta tag more enticing to readers. The title tag should contain the term and your organization name, and your meta tag should have a call to action. One example I have – a client of mine was ranking very well for queries related to financial abuse, but the CTR was very low.

SEO analysis of the ranking page’s title tag and meta tag determined that they were not enticing readers to click; the tags made no promise of what you would find if you read the page, such as ‘read here to learn more about financial abuse.’ The client updated the title and meta tags, and CTR for financial abuse related queries is now up an average of 3 points.”

Using marketing reporting software can provide detailed insights on CTR and help identify which pages and keywords require optimization to improve click-through rates.

19. Exclude all branded keywords’ variations

“One simple & easy way to unlock important insights in Google Search Console is to exclude all variations of branded keywords,” shares Brandon Chopp from iHeartRaves.

“This shows you what queries are giving you the most traffic and what average position you are ranking for in search engine results. This has allowed us to see what keywords we should be focusing on SEO & identify targets for anchor text for our backlink strategy.”

20. Filter through keywords via organic search volume

The Word Counter’s Kevin Miller suggests, “One important way to filter or sort through keywords is via organic search volume. Before you put resources into optimizing for certain keywords, you want to be sure that they are ones that have real value, and that means choosing keywords that have high search volume without overly-high competition.”

Related: 49 Ways to Track Your Performance in SERPs Using Only Google Search Console

21. Filter pages by impressions

Andrew Buck of LandingCube shares another way to apply filters in the Google Search Console. “I use Google Search Console to improve the click-through rate of my posts. I’ll filter pages by impressions, then for the pages getting the most impressions, look at impressions vs. clicks for individual search terms.

By doing this, I’m able to identify search terms that may be providing posts with a lot of impressions but few clicks. If this search term is high volume and relevant to our content, I’ll make some changes to the meta description/SEO title. This almost always results in an uptick in traffic (due to a higher CTR), without any change in rankings.”

22. Filter for average position

Kristian Rivera of FitSmallBusiness shares their experience using this filter. “When I’m using Google Search Console, I focus on our queries in the Performance report and look at three metrics: Total Impressions, Average CTR, and Average Position.

This will tell me on average where we are ranking, what our CTR is for that query/keyword, and estimate how many people are searching for that term. Once I have those metrics added, I filter Average Position to look for anything smaller than position 10.

This will show me any queries where we are ranking on page 1 of Google SERPs. This helps me to identify which keywords are most likely driving traffic to our site and where there is an opportunity to improve our rankings to increase traffic. From there, I look at Average CTR and Total Impressions to help us prioritize which keywords we focus on first.”

Best practices bonus:

Before we end this post, we’ve some bonus tips to share with you. Keep this in mind as you use any of these Google Search Console filters:

• Filter to the smallest level possible

“Aggregated metrics for rank, CTR, and other important data can become counter-intuitive when looking at a large number of pages or keywords as a set. At the page level, a URL that is picking up new high volume keyword rankings can look like it’s trending negatively in ranking and CTR because of the influx of new impressions that aren’t yet earning clicks, but it’s actually a good thing. If you filter to EITHER a single URL or a single keyword, that data will become much cleaner and help you make the right decision.” – Ross Briggs, G2.

• Avoid keyword cannibalization by alternating between the following tabs.

“One way to filter your keyword and/or page data in Google Search Console is to use the performance metrics tab listed directly under overview. By alternating between the queries tab and pages tab, you can click on the individual keyword or page you desire to filter to gain specific data based on that specified filter. This is especially helpful for avoiding keyword cannibalization, or having the same keyword rank for multiple pages.” – Dustin Singer, Dustin Buys Houses.

• Export your results for better insights

“One very useful way of analyzing Google Search Console data is by exporting the results to Google Sheets, Excel, or CSV. You can then create a pivot chart of keywords using the ‘Queries’ sheet. I get insight into the volume of searches based on common words within the queries. This helps me understand the intent of my readers’ searches and how I can provide more value by directly addressing their queries.” – Fred Blair, Awesome Hoops.

• Filter for device

“One of the first filters I apply to Search Console when analyzing click and impression data is for the device. Google is now separately indexing mobile vs. desktop content, so it’s not unusual for traffic to trend differently by the device. It’s important to understand whether traffic changes are impacting both mobile and desktop visitors.” – Alice Jones, Pettable.

Typing it all together

Using the right Google Search Console filters, you can significantly improve your SEO game by identifying which pages and keywords are ranking well and which need work. With these 22 ways to use filters in Google Search Console, we’re positive you’ll learn lots. So what are you waiting for? You’ve some filtering to do. ?

The post 22 Ways to Use Google Search Console Filters to Filter Data appeared first on Databox.

The bad news?

Somebody needs to take those spots–and sometimes, it won’t be your website. It might be your competitor’s.

In those situations, what can you do?

A good first step is understanding the things they’re doing right, as well as the opportunities from things they’re missing, by conducting an SEO competitive analysis.

So where do you start? We polled more than 100 marketing pros for the tools and tips they rely on most.

But first…

What is an SEO competitive analysis?

Before we dive in, let’s cover exactly what a competitor analysis is.

An SEO competitive analysis looks at your competitor’s most important SEO metrics to figure out how (and why) they’re doing what they’re doing.

This can provide two unique opportunities, as Chris Love of Love2Dev explains: “When I review mine or my client’s competition I try to deduce what the other guys are trying to accomplish. Is this something we should be doing as well? Or is the competition aimed in the wrong direction and how can we exploit that weakness.”

How often should I run an SEO competitor analysis?

Now we know what an SEO competitor analysis is, you might be wondering how often to look at your competitors’ strategy to find hidden opportunities to overtake them.

The majority of experts we polled said they run analyses monthly or quarterly:

However, Jeremie Carroll of Smart Exposure Marketing says: “I do these analyses at the very beginning of a new client relationship and roughly every year after that. A quality SEO strategy will take about a year to really be effective and followup research can reveal additional opportunities.”

How do I find my competitors for SEO?

You can’t do an SEO competitor analysis without knowing who you should be comparing your strategy to.

“The easiest way to find direct competitors is to look up what your business provides and see who else offers the same product,” writes Melanie Musson of QuickQuote.com.

“If you do some keyword searches and find certain of those direct competitors popping up frequently, they’re the ones to watch. Similarly, if you see an indirect competitor showing up in those same keyword searches, add them to your tracking.”

Clixsy‘s Allen Levings adds: “If you aren’t selling something on your site, don’t compare your site to Amazon or Walmart. Similarly, if you aren’t a directory, don’t include Thumbtack, Expertise, and other directories in your competitor analysis.”

DealNews‘ Gennady Lager agrees: “If you run a small blog, do not compare your site to massive, well-known blogs with vastly different goals, resources, budgets, revenue models, and publication calendars. You want to try and make your analysis as like-for-like as you can.”

“The metrics around a large site and why it ranks well may be completely different than those for a smaller site. I recommend hand-picking who you are competing against in your analysis and try to punch one or two weight classes up. You also want to provide analysis on sites with similar targets.”

“For example, if you run a local news website, doing on analysis on Reuters is probably not a good use of your time as the primary targets are very different,” Lager says.

Dan Young of Loud Digital advises to “be realistic with the size of competitors you analyze, find competitors you can actually compete with when it comes to budget, so you set achievable goals.”

However, Kiwi Creative‘s Giselle Bardwell says: “A tidbit we tell our clients that is often a surprise to them is that their industry competitors are not the same as SEO competitors.”

“Many of our clients know who their industry competitors are, but do not realize there is a difference between industry competitors and those with whom they compete in search engine results pages (SERPs).”

There’s also an easier way to do this for agencies, as Blue Fusion Digital‘s Shane Hampson explains: “Don’t assume you know who the top competitors are for your client (potential client) let them give you insights as to why they believe are their top competitors in addition to what your toolsets will reveal to you.”

How do I analyze my competitor’s website for SEO?

“Digital marketing and SEO have breached a new point in technology making it easier and more effective for businesses to advertise in an online world,” Sarah Franklin of Blue Tree AI explains.

“It is very important to run SEO competitive analysis reports to gain insight into what is working and what is not in a particular industry.”

So, how do you run an effective SEO competitor analysis? And what things should your report include?

We asked 60+ experts to share their opinions, which included:

1. Know why you’re comparing
2. Compare keyword rankings
3. Look for topics, not keywords
4. Check their traffic sources
5. Compare your competitors’ backlink profiles
6. Look at their internal link structure
7. Check their Google News coverage
8. Use a premade SEO competitor analysis dashboard
9. Or create your own scorecard
10. Look at more than SEO KPIs
11. Figure how to improve your competitor’s metrics
12. But don’t copy their strategy
13. Analyze more than one competitor
14. Group together your competitors
15. Spend time reading the data
16. Consider Wikipedia an SEO competitor

1. Know why you’re comparing the websites

According to Carolyn Thomson of Wealth Grow Wisdom, “the one tip for running an effective SEO competitive analysis report is to outline your overall objective.”

“Having an objective for the analysis will enable you to determine how broad you should go in your analysis (direct competitors only or larger competition). It will also enable you to look into the areas that most interest you.”

Thomson explains: “For instance, if the objective for the competitive analysis is to determine the communications axis of each competitor in order to come up with positioning for a brand, we will look at their organic content, visuals, copy, etc. If the objective is to check if our product/service pricing is right, we will look at the competition’s pricing.”

“It seems like a no-brainer but it is sometimes overlooked, leading to broad analyses which are not very insightful.”

Directive‘s Brendan Hufford agrees: “One thing that almost nobody talks about (and few think about) is asking yourself a core question before getting started, “What do I want to get out of this information?”

“Sometimes, we look at competitor data to benchmark against them, but why are we SPECIFICALLY looking? It could be a specific product line, or their blog is taking off, of link-building tactics they’re using, etc.”

“The key here is to have a GOAL when doing a competitive analysis report versus overwhelming yourself with a ton of non-actionable information.”

David Gossage of lookfantastic summarizes: “Have a clear idea of the desired outcome. Competitor analysis can throw up massive amounts of data and be hellishly time-consuming. Having a clear goal before you start can help prevent a lot of wasted time, increase automation opportunities to avoid the dreaded question, “so what?”

2. Compare your keyword rankings

“The first and foremost tip for running an effective SEO competitive analysis report is to identify the keywords that your website can target in your niche,” 10Web‘s Armine Hayrapetyan advises.

“Our SEO team runs competitive analysis on a weekly basis for blog post strategy, i.e. find top 10 pages that rank on the first page of Google with specific keywords, try to outrank them by developing deeper and longer content and acquiring more backlinks than your competitors.”

Peter Song of Haki Review Mashup has a tactic for using this competitor data: “Basically, I try to find those that have low search results but high search volume. Then, I rank it by the keyword value from the highest and to the lowest. I target higher keywords for SEO.”

In fact, the vast majority of SEO experts say that keyword competition is either ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ important to their strategy:

Gary Hyman also recommends to “quantify competitor keyword traffic. In other words, understand the volume that your competitors’ primary keyword phrases are pulling into their website.”

Trevan Marden of Predictable Growth Marketing adds: “Dig deep into the keywords your competitors are targeting – what are their strategies and what tactics are they implementing and how do they compare to your own company.”

“Try to find out if they are being successful or chasing empty results. You do not want to emulate their failings. Seek opportunities the competition may have missed.”

Max Allegro of Intuitive Digital summarizes: “Reports are able to track the performance of your domain compared to your competitors in terms of total keywords, most valuable keywords, and keyword overlap for the terms you are competing with directly.”

“This will give you a good idea for how competitive some of the keywords you are targeting are, as well as help you identify some gaps in your current keyword strategy.”

3. Look for topics instead of keywords

Not all of our experts advise looking at keywords in an SEO competitor analysis.

“When running SEO competition analysis I often see people being to focused/zoomed in on a few keywords instead of grasping the topic and all surrounding phrases that are included,” says Igor Buyseech.

“Studies have shown that an average 1st place ranking in the SERPs is ranking for 1000+ keywords, which doesn’t happen by accident. The content itself is of course not filled with 1000 instances of that keyword, but if the main variations are placed in the correct places (metadata, h-tags, img alts etc.) it will cover the broader aspect.”

“I therefore always check the top ranking sites for my main variations and reverse engineer their rankings via tools like Ahrefs to see what their specific sites/URLs actually rank for.”

Buyseech explains: “Once I established what they rank for and get a list of keywords I can check the power and continue with a more detailed analysis of the pages that are ranking for the most keywords, preferably with the least backlinks and authority. Why? Because those pages are doing a lot of things correctly on the on-page/content side of things and are ranking because of it.”

“So my main advice is to always check the broader picture of what the competitors ranking above you are ranking for, and not to get caught up in 1 or 2 main keywords and stuffing them across the board.”

This can impact your entire keyword research strategy, as Digimark‘s Steven Jaenke explains: “One of the things that I’ve found over the years is that if my team and I run a competitive analysis before we do keyword research, the competitive analysis corrupts our objectivity.”

“Now we do keyword research first, then the competitive analysis and add any keywords from the analysis to our keyword research spreadsheet.”

4. Check their traffic sources

“One thing that never goes out of style is site traffic,” Beekeeper‘s Alexandra Zamolo says. “It’s always essential to check the site traffic for certain topics that you’re hoping will rank, backed by a good SEO strategy. By checking competitor’s site traffic on the same topics or pages through Ahrefs, you can see how you measure up.”

Aleksi Halsas of Trustmary recommends to “check competitor websites on what content they are getting the most traffic from [because] focusing too much on different metrics just takes away focus.”

Lance Beaudry of Avalanche Creative explains: “Once you’ve identified your competition, filter their traffic by traffic percentage. Find the pages that are driving the most valuable traffic that are non-branded. Look at the content, see if you can compete.”

5. Compare your competitor’s backlink profiles

“The best tip for running an effective SEO competitive analysis report is to examine their backlink profile and the rate at which they produce quality content,” says Christopher Grozdon of DASH-SEO.

“These two factors (backlink quality/quantity and fresh/consistent content) are one of the strongest influencers when it comes to ranking high within search engines. Continue to acquire backlinks and also produce consistent, high-quality content. From there, you’ll eventually surpass your competition.”

Pelicoin‘s Sam Olmsted explains why this is important: “Links are a sign of “trustworthiness” for search engines like Google and Bing. The more quality links a site has, the more authoritative that site becomes. By understanding your competition’s link profile, you can see how aggressive you need to be in your link building efforts.”

“For example, by getting a list of the websites linking to your competitors, you can not only see which sites in your vertical are likely to give backlinks and go after them but also check the type of content that works for your competitors and the strategies they use to get those backlinks,” Glassdoor‘s Ophélie Marten-Jeanroy explains.

That’s why ZooWho‘s Claire Shaner recommends to “see which backlinks they have in common. Are those same sites also linking to you? If not, you’ve just discovered a site to pitch to or an industry-specific directory.”

However, Copygun‘s Valerio Puggioni says: “Many people simply plug in a website into a backlinks checker and pull backlink reports without really knowing what they’re doing, aimlessly plugging away at what’s being shown.”

“They tend to neglect the most important step, which is to analyze the backlink profile of each competitor carefully, trying to determine HOW a competitor’s overall link-building strategy looks like.”

“This way, we can quickly gauge which sites are actually worth reaching out to, which ones will be paid (my team doesn’t pay for links), and which ones are spammy, and shouldn’t be pursued,” Puggioni adds.

Bonus: “While running a competitive analysis and finding backlinks to replicate make sure the links are not from their [connections],” says SendX‘s Christeen Paul.

“If you dig a bit deeper and find links repeated from the same domain. You can understand that some links will be from their connections or clients. Make sure you remove these from your report.”

Related: 10 Creative Ways to Build Links And Outrank Your Competitors

6. Look at their internal link structure, too

“My one tip for an effective SEO competitive analysis is to remember to focus on internal link-building and overall website architecture,” Billig Fitness‘ Michael Kirkegaard Clausen says.

“With the right internal link-structure, you will create a better balance to your website and the most valuable pages will get a better PageRank. If a page with a few referring domains are ranking well, it might be thanks to a strong internal-link-structure.”

Faizan Ali of WPBeginner agrees: “We also keep a close look on their internal linking strategy with the help of an audit tool.”

7. Check their Google News coverage

“One thing that we do for our clients is to do checks on Google News for their niche or city to see what other businesses are doing for PR,” says Sam Romain of Romain Berg.

“Knowing what your competitors are doing for their PR can give insights. This can also flush out competitors you didn’t know existed which you can then plug into tools like SEMRush to do a deeper dive on their keywords, content, and link building strategies.”

8. Use a premade SEO competitor analysis dashboard

“One tip I would suggest is to develop a nice looking templated report and then utilize an industry-leading tool to fill in the data,” writes RKD‘s Bryan Coles.

“If you can automate some of this via custom report building or API into your own system, even better. With that said ensure that you have some areas for personalization to the client.”

*Editor’s note: Don’t waste time creating your own templates. We’ve got a bunch of pre-made SEO dashboards that sync with the tools you’re already using, pulling data from various software to see all in one place:

9. Or create your own scorecard

Tom Jager of bestessays.com agrees that it is “important to conduct an effective SEO competitive analysis report, and although there are many ways to do so, you can score them according to a checklist.”

“The checklist you use must be based on the sites of the competition, so you need to know who you are competing with. Once you have that data, you can score the websites of the top 5 competitors you have. You can check things such as its technical optimization, content creation, and curation, content sharing options, call to actions and the overall user experience.”

“The scorecard can then form part of your SEO competitive analysis report and help you identify where you can improve. For example, you could possibly improve on content sharing options by including more social media buttons to easily share the content,” Jager continues.

“It is crucial to know what the competition is up to so you won’t be too far behind. Conducting an effective SEO competitive analysis report will keep you up to date and ready to adapt to new strategies.”

10. Look at more than SEO metrics

It’s easy to focus on the most important SEO KPIs when comparing your website to competitors. However, Jeremy Cross of Team Building Las Vegas recommends: “Instead of just focusing on the numbers, also include some soft analysis.”

“For example, search two or three of the main competitors and look at what they are doing. Is competition publishing more or less frequently? Using higher quality images? Updating their directory listings?”

“Analysis like this can show you not just where you stand compared to the competition now, but also help predict where you may be in a few month’s time,” Cross explains.

“You should be actively reviewing user experience of your top competitors to see if that is assisting their growth,” Cody Bollerman adds. “Sign up for their newsletters to review their content, keep an eye on things from a customer perspective as well instead of just sticking to the software.”

CloudApp‘s Maile Waite agrees: “Instead of hyper-focusing on specific data points, try to look at all of the data holistically and ask “why?”

“Think of why the keyword density, word count, etc. on a competitor’s site makes their content valuable. So often, competitive analyses focus on individual components without answering why certain sites are successfully ranking.”

Jordie Black of Coffee and Check summarizes: “It’s no good just seeing that a competitor ranks higher than you. Instead, look at why they rank higher – what is it about their content that Google likes. Does it have more backlinks etc.”

“When you do this, you’ll be much better equipped to work out how you can use your analysis report to improve your content.”

PRO TIP: How to Monitor and Evaluate Your SEO Performance

If you want to understand how your visitors are behaving on your landing pages, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console that will help:

• Organic clicks by queries. Which search queries generate the most clicks to your website?
• Organic clicks by page. Which pages receive the most clicks from search results pages?
• Organic sessions. How many organic search sessions does your website receive?
• Organic engaged sessions. How many website visitors were engaged with your content? An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.
• Views per channel. Which channels generate the most views to your website?

And more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our SEO and website conversion experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for monitoring your landing page performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Try this template

11. Figure how to improve on your competitor’s results

Toni JV of JVT Media says that when you’re conducting an SEO competitive analysis, “the one question you have to ask yourself is: “Can I add something better and/or different to these search results?”

“Even if your domain authority is lower (within reason, of course), if you can add something that’s 5-10 times better than the top ranking page, or even better, something that’s different from that article, you can compete for it.”

JV puts that into action: “Maybe the top ranking blog is 5 years old and you could come in with a freshly updated article? Maybe it’s got a viewpoint that you highly disagree with, and you can create a blog about the opposing viewpoint, and thus be polarizing and stand out? Maybe the top ranking blog is only 1000 words long, and you can create a 5000-word article with quality information that adds 10 times the value to the end-user?”

“Remember, Google simply wants to give searchers the best result for their query. If you can satisfy this better than anyone else, you’re well on your way.”

That’s why Jeremy Lopatin of Climb Marketing says: “Keep up on the competitions’ rankings for specific keywords, but remain aware of your overall “footprint” of your organic visibility, and how it compares to that of the completion.”

12. …But don’t copy their strategy

You’ll likely feel the temptation to copy your competitor’s SEO strategy if you uncover a hidden gem.

But Best Company‘s Alice Stevens warns: “Be careful with how much you let your competitor analysis inform your strategy. You want to be different and stand out from your competitors, so focus on your goals and priorities first.”

“In fact, your competitors may be taking short-cuts that will not be beneficial in the long-run. If your strategy is too dependent on your competitors, you’ll probably fall into the same traps.”

13. Analyze more than one competitor website

“One is just not enough,” says Rishikesh Fulari of Hashtag Technologies. “Go through as many competitor sites as possible. In the process, you will discover a lot more opportunities that you didn’t notice before.”

Austin Shong of Blip Billboards adds: “Of course, it’s important to keep an eye on your direct competitors, but don’t forget about indirect competitors.”

“Periodically, I like to do a broader analysis and check in on potential substitutes that we don’t directly compete with. This is good for keeping a thumb on what direction they’re headed and can potentially give good ideas on what keywords to go after next.”

That’s also why SEO Locale‘s Nick Quirke recommends to “analyze 10 competitors and leverage the data you pull for an on-page and off-page strategy. SEO isn’t just one strategy for every client. We tweak our strategy every week for all of our clients in different industries.”

14. Analyze groups of competitors

You might have different competitors for each feature, product, or service you provide.

For this reason, Software Pundit‘s Bruce Hogan says: “When running the analysis, separate your competitors into established leaders and newer, fast-growing websites.”

“The keywords that the newer, fast-growing website is capturing are both relevant to your website, and easier to capture. You have a better chance of competing with websites with lower domain authority, than an established player that is many years ahead of your website.”

Joshua Ballard of Paradox Marketing explains: “You should be placing domains into one of three camps:

1. Competing for the same search queries, but not competing for the same customer base
2. Competing for the same customer base, but not the same queries
3. Not competing for the same queries or customer base (aka, do not go into depth on this one)

“This step is important as it is really allowing you to filter between what will end up being your competitors, and what could actually end up becoming your collaborators.

“Other companies who are writing for the same audience as you, but do not have a competing service or product offering are actually far more useful for you to identify than direct competitors,” Ballard adds.

15. Spend time digging into the data

When running your SEO competitive analysis, Luke Eales of Seven Star Digital advises against being “seduced by competitive-analysis-by-numbers.”

“It’s great to have standardized reports that objectively track competitor KPIs, but the qualitative factors and overriding narrative provide far more insight.”

Eales explains: “This means you shouldn’t simply outsource laborious competitor analysis to a junior team-member or third party. Instead, ensure your best minds have the time and space to dig into the competitor landscape, make sense of what they’re seeing and respond accordingly.”

16. Consider Wikipedia as a competitor

According to Smartoperations‘ Olivier Houart, you might be missing a competitor with tons of SEO data to browse through: “There is an angle there where you can find interesting pages in the references and external links sections of your keyword search in Wikipedia.”

“You will find interesting links and if you use them in the SEO tool of our choice where you can increase your list of websites, keywords people and blogs you can relate to. You have a high chance to stumble over competitors you haven’t identified yet.”

After all, Wikipedia is one of the most powerful websites in the world, SEO-wise:

4 SEO Competitor Analysis Tools That Readers Recommend Most

As Assisted‘s Tristan James explains, professional SEO competitor analysis tools “give you a range of ways to collect and analyze competitor information that you otherwise wouldn’t have.”

“It can make the difference between creating a surface-level report and a deeper analysis that will give you a much better idea of what your competitor is up to.”

So, which tools should you have in your toolkit to make SEO competitor analysis ten times easier?

Our experts recommend:

Moz Open Site Explorer

Spencer Andrews of Integritive prefers Moz’s Open Site Explorer tool because it “allows you to view a competitor’s domain authority, how many backlinks they have and where they are from, and their rankings for keywords.”

“This allows you to compare yourself to competitors and see where you initially stand before or after completing on and off-page SEO work.”

*Editor’s note: Keep an eye on how your competitors’ SEO strategy chances with our Moz Competitor Overview dashboard. It shows how key metrics–including Domain Authority and the number of linking root domains-change over time:

Ahrefs

“Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool allows you to simply enter the URL of your competitor(s) against your own site to get a detailed breakdown of where your competitors rank, for which keyword, to help you identify which keywords to pursue and create/optimize content around,” says Tim Dugan of Zero Gravity Marketing.

This is the Content Gap feature–something Dugan thinks that by analyzing, “you can identify what keywords your competition is ranking, for which page and at which position.”

Michael Keenan adds: “Filter out the top volume keywords with low keyword difficulty and referral domains (using Ahrefs or another tool), and plan to create better articles than them for those keywords.”

Christina Pigol explains: “For example, CIENCE specializes in outbound B2B lead generation, and when I perform content gap research, I usually include Hubspot (CRM provider for both inbound and outbound marketers), SalesHacker (B2B sales-related media) and other more narrowly specialized companies (e.g. MailChimp or Woodpecker who provide email software).”

“To see the most complete picture, I recommend analyzing all 10 websites that Ahrefs allows, with 2-4 being influencers, not competitors, and choose the option to show 3 or more target intersections.”

Ever Increasing Circles‘ Alistair Dodds also explains how use Ahrefs to find opportunities to overtake your SEO competitors: “Use Ahrefs to research their search numbers, find the top 10 competitors per term and export the table to excel. Order by URL, filter by do-follow links and then filter out sites your competitors have built or do the marketing work for.”

“Then work through red-lining anything that’s non-industry or location related, anything that’s spam or clearly a paid submission and then see what’s left with a reasonable UR and DR combination.

“Those are your top tier targets. Are they realistic for you to achieve?”

(There’s a reason why Ahrefs was found to be the most popular SEO competitor analysis tool.)

SEMrush

Annalisa Hilliard of Data Dames Marketing thinks “SEMrush is a great tool to help with competitor analysis, as is performing searches on client keywords on various search engines, social networks and video platforms (like YouTube and Vimeo) to see who their competitors are on each of those platforms and what those competitors are creating that’s working.”

SimilarWeb

According to Daniel Noakes, the team at UClimb think “Similar Web is a great tool for any kind of competitive analysis comparison report, including SEO.”

“It’s a very expensive tool if you want to use it regularly (over £7k a year), but they offer a free trial, so for the occasional report ad-hoc it’s a great free tool.”

Use a variety of these SEO competitor tools

These tools provide tons of data for you to dive into.

However, David Kranker of Budget Branders says: “The one tip I would provide would be to use as many different data sources as you have available to you when it comes to seeing what content is performing well for competitors and what links they have.”

“Different tools operate differently and may provide different estimates or find different links. For instance, Majestic has a great historical link database and can provide more historical link information than other tools like Ahrefs can.”

“When you run your competitors through multiple tools, you’ll be able to fill in gaps and get a more complete picture,” Kranker adds.

As Alexander Rodrigues of Semântico says: “Do not rely on tools blindly. Look at the site as a whole, open the code and understand what they are doing and, most importantly, understand how they create the content of the site.”

But regardless of the tool(s) you’re using, Reef Digital‘s Piotr Olesson says: “My one main tip would be to refresh your skills on these tools or tools of your choice before running your next competitive report. This will certainly be an invaluable exercise because you never know what new insight or feature you might discover.”

Final thoughts

“If you want to get ahead of the competition in SEO, it is critical you know what you are up against,” Stan Mead of Summit Home Buyers LLC summarizes.

Use these tips to find your competitors, and try to uncover their SEO strategy. You’ll soon start to overtake them.

The post The SEO Competitive Analysis Tools & Tips 100+ Marketers Rely On Most appeared first on Databox.