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Lesson 5 of 8
Increase traffic with Search Console
Start building your audience
Build your audience with News Consumer Insights
Reach younger and diverse audiences (9:00)
Tools for News Publishers
Course
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15 minutes to complete

Increase traffic with Search Console

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Increase traffic with Search Console

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See your site’s Search traffic with Google Search Console

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Google Search Console helps you…

  • Analyse your site’s performance
  • See if your content is properly crawled and indexed
  • Improve search performance with data

How do I know if my site is appearing in Search?

  1. Go to search.google.com/search-console
  2. Click URL Inspection
  3. Enter the link to your page or site

Check your site to see if you can get to a page from your site navigation

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Where does Search traffic come from?

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  • Search: Google Search results and the News tab
  • Discover: The Google Search app on Android and iOS, Chrome and the Following tab
  • News: news.google.com and the Google Search app on Android and iOS

How do I see traffic data for Search, Discover or Google News?

  1. Go to search.google.com/search-console
  2. Under Performance, select Search, Discover or Google News
  3. Get your data by clicking Export in the top right corner

Best practice: Export your Google Search, Google News and Discover data, and compare how sections, formats and topics perform across each source.

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Understand how audiences get to your site

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Under Search results, Discover or Google News, get insights on:

  • Queries (Search results only): What people searched to get to your site
  • Pages: Which pages get the most clicks and impressions
  • Appearance: How text, image, video or news content performs
  • Countries
  • Devices

💡Best practices

  • In Queries, identify what people come to your site for by looking for queries that include your site name, like 'local sports Example Times'
  • Create a filter for each country to see data for that audience
  • Identify which of your titles and descriptions have the highest click-through rates
  • In Devices, use this data to make formatting decisions, like focusing on your mobile layouts
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Understand your traffic based on time ranges

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Different time ranges will give you different insights about your traffic. Click the Date button at the top of the page to adjust your time range.

  • Select Most recent date to see trending terms and ongoing stories
  • Select Last three months or shorter to see how bigger news stories perform
  • Select Last six months or longer to see how evergreen content performs
  • Select Last 16 months to understand your traffic on average

Once you understand your traffic patterns, use this data to plan content:

  • Prepare interesting, relevant content ahead for known, regularly occurring events, like holidays
  • Use Google Trends to understand traffic based on different times of year
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Explore more resources

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