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Chapter 3. Google Search Console, Tag Manager and Data Studio

Google Search Console

This is my favourite tool of all three of I will look at today. Google Search Console, if you don’t have it, get it and start setting this up. Google Search Console will give you insight of how Google sees your website, your errors, performance of your site (with Core Web Vitals) and terms your users are searching to reach your site.

The fun part is you can see the keywords that you’re ranking for and which pages are ranking, as well as the impressions and clicks for these terms. One drawback is that you have to manually look at it through Google Search Console. If you wanted to go into the report, you’d have to look at a specific page or query, and then if you export the data and it still shows in separate tabs.

With Search Analytics for Sheets add-on, you can see all of it in one place. It will output a table like you see in the image below of all your pages and queries. Not just one query and not just one page, but also all the clicks and impressions.

When you run the add-on, choose to group by page, query.

Data range
Excel sheets

Sort the data above descending by either impressions or clicks. Whichever is most relevant to you. Then use the formula below to find the keyword with the most impressions or clicks for each page.

=ArrayFormula(QUERY({SORT(A2:D,1,false,4,false),IFERROR(row(A2:A)-match(query(SORT(A2:D,1,false,4,false),”Select Col1″),query(SORT(A2:D,1,false,4,false),”Select Col1″),0))},”Select Col1,Col2,Col3,Col4 where Col5<2″))

Put it over in cell H2 or somewhere over there.

This is very useful if you’re working on your keyword strategy or looking for some new content ideas. You can see what Google is already recognizing your website for and you can then incorporate this into your content strategy.

Of course, the Authoritas Google Search Console integration does all this and a lot more. 

Google+Search+Console+CTR+models
Barb Davids on Tea Time SEO

Barb Davids

SEO Consultant

Barb Davids is a digital marketer, SEO strategist and owner of Compass Digital Strategies. Driven by data and analytics, she works hard to get business-changing results for her clients, such as 256% more website traffic and 22% more leads. As lockdown began and clients lost budget, she continued working on some pro bono for a couple of months. Offering free help to select industries. Her own business as a result has pivoted and begun to offer online courses so that business owners can work to gain more site traffic and leads at a more budget friendly cost.

Watch our Tea Time SEO session here:

Table of Contents

Can we help?

If you are looking for an easy way to automate much of the advice given in this guide, then please book a call with one of our platform experts to explore whether we have what you need.

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Google Tag Manager

Some people are afraid of Google Tag Manager as you can easily set up tags incorrectly, but it’s a helpful tool for adding things to your Google Analytics without having to know how to code. All of the following are found in Events.

One example is looking at tracking scroll depth of a page. Let’s say you notice a high bounce rate on a specific page. Therefore an initial step is to analyse how far people are scrolling down on your page. If you notice that they’re only going down to 50%, then you can alter your call to action, either add more at the top or make the content more engaging to encourage users to stay on the page.

In order to set this up, go to your Google Analytics, then once there follow these steps:

Google Analytics > Behaviour > Events > Pages

Choose a page and then choose Event Action as the primary dimension.

Here are some Google Tag Manager recipes to help you get started:

Events in GA

Google Data Studio

I’m recapping what Steph and Christopher talked about in terms of making sure that you’re tracking your macro and micro goals. It’s something that you have to do regularly basis, rather than just every month or when you see a problem. Google Data Studio is an easy way to pull in all the data from everywhere.

For example, you could have one page with all your high-level metrics, then on the sub-pages, you could have some of those metrics that impact the bigger ones. You can pull in Analytics, Search Console, Google Sheets. However, if you have data in Google Sheets you can track your keywords over time in a much more friendly interface for you or your clients.

Download a sample report here.

Of course, Authoritas has a couple of useful integrations and tools that help pull data into Google Data Studio and Google Sheets.  There’s a new Google Sheets App that allows you to pull fresh keyword rankings and SERP data from their SERPs API into Google Sheets (free for 1,000 keyword checks per month)

Authoritas also has a comprehensive integration with Big Query and Google Data Studio that allows you to automatically pull keyword ranking, crawl data, analytics, search console, link data, share of search and more into Big Query and then automatically update and customise some great Google Data Studio templates.

Closing Remarks

We have shared a few recommendations about SEO Reporting at Tea Time SEO and how you can extract a lot of data without it consuming too much of your time. It is very important to have insightful reports that reflect the work from the team and can be shared with the C-level. SEO as we know, can be difficult or more complex to see results (when compared with PPC) and therefore any reporting should be easy to understand as SEO is not just a silo channel, it is an integrated part of online marketing.

Thank you again to our co-authors for sharing their expertise with us. If you would like to contribute to this or any of our other Ultimate SEO Guide series then get in touch with us via marketing@authoritas.com.

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