Google Search Console Keyword Research Report

Keyword research is a critical step in the SEO process: it involves looking at what terms and queries people perform on search engines to create relevant content to help them sort their needs out while promoting your products. Google Search Console (GSC) is a popular tool that tracks, maintains, and optimizes your website’s visibility in Google search results. This visibility is crucial to your product growth, as Google holds a whopping 92% market share of mobile and desktop searches. One of the dimensions you can employ in Google Search Console to track your site performance is keywords: that’s why GSC can be used profitably in keyword research. Keywords can be classified across different dimensions: the first one is branded Vs non-branded keywords. Branded keywords are queries that include your brand name, while non-branded keywords don’t. By focusing on the non-branded keywords you will build topical authority by positioning your product as one of the leaders for specific tasks or domains thus contributing to long-term stable growth. The other dimension refers to what stage in the ‘purchase decision’ they refer to. In this respect, there are 4 types of keywords: (i) Informational: queries whose intent is to find information about something (e.g. France population) (ii) Navigational: queries used to find a specific website or page (e.g. Rows templates) (iii) Commercial: queries used to investigate a product or a brand (e.g. Best spreadsheet tools) (iv) Transactional: queries whose intent is to act (e.g. signup to Rows).

The Google Search Console API allows you to bring those insights for free on Rows spreadsheets, giving you extra flexibility in transforming, presenting, and sharing them with your team. This template will take you through three steps for using Google Search Console for keyword research:

• identifying high-value keywords to keep in your strategy,
• finding high-performing keywords that need extra work,and
• discovering "easy wins" or low-hanging fruits.

Start with the first table to see the top 10 non-branded high-value keywords: these search terms are already driving traffic to your site. Keep them in your strategy to continue benefiting. Then you go through the top 10 keywords to work on: these queries have high impressions but low CTR, meaning that you’re ranking too far down the SERPs. They identify content that needs optimizing. A few on-page tweaks could help you rank higher so you can generate more traffic to your site. Finally, focus on SEO low-hanging fruits: the top keywords ranking in position 4-10 represent a sweet spot, as a small tweak to the page they are ranking for may have a great impact on the traffic by increasing the CTR substantially. Remember that you can expect an average 4x increase in the number of clicks by moving those pages to position 1-3. After identifying these keywords, you can begin to optimize your content and measure your outcomes on GSC. Monitoring your progress over time will help you understand what strategies work best for improving your site's visibility, and which ones need to be revisited.