 That's why I came here after all. All right, well, welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming to this talk. I appreciate you being here on Sunday after lunch. Hopefully we'll keep it lively so you don't fall asleep. And I also want to thank the organizers for putting on this awesome event. It takes a lot. And I appreciate all you taking time out of your busy lives to make this happen. So thank you. All right, so why are we here to talk about improving the rankings of our websites using the new Google Search Console? So when it comes to Google products, they can often feel quite overwhelming. I mean, I remember the first time I jumped into Google Analytics over a decade ago, I was like, what is going on in here? I was totally out of my depth. I couldn't figure out what was going on. There are so many functions, so many features. And it made it really challenging to figure it out. And as humans, we're not really adapted to deal with that many options all right there in our face. And when that happens, when we see all those features, all those functions, what happens? A stress response happens. Our eyes, they send signals to our amygdala. That's that little lizard part of our brain, which says to our hypothalamus, hey, sympathetic nervous system, you need to dump cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine into the bloodstream so we can either fight this or get out of here. And when that happens, typically when it comes to software, we choose to take off. We choose to run away, put it on the back burner, save it for another day. But today, what we're going to be doing is giving you the skills you need to let that stress wash over you so that you can start taking control of your rankings and how you're appearing in search. And we're going to do that by giving you the knowledge you need to operate comfortably within Google Search Console. Make the most of the tools and reports in there, and make some really good decisions with the insights that they're giving you. Why? Because at the end of the day, when you improve your rankings, that's going to drive more qualified traffic to your site. Hopefully, that qualified traffic is going to be converting, creating more revenue for you or your clients. So this talk is going to be broken into three parts. We have a lot to cover today in an hour, so I'm going to do my best to get to all of it. And if for some reason I don't or I don't answer a question you had, I'm going to head over towards a happiness bar after this. So feel free to come, bug me, and I'll answer whatever Google Search Console questions you have. As I mentioned, lots of features, lots to cover. So here's how we're going to break it down. We're going to start by talking about the proper setup. If you're not set up properly, you're not going to be dealing with the best data possible. You're not going to be able to get those really quality insights that are going to allow you to take action. Then we're going to dive into the most useful tools and reports that are really going to help you improve your rankings. We're not going to get into absolutely every little function in there, but the most important ones for you to know how to use. And then we're going to talk about some actual tactics, some optimization improvement tactics that you can walk away from here today with, go home, and actually start using for you and your clients. And let's talk about why Google Search Console exists. So it allows us to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot how our sites are performing in Google. And that's huge, because Google is showing us what it knows about our sites. And it's allowing us to communicate it with it and tell it what we want it to know about our sites. They're giving us data back that we can then go use to improve how we're performing. And so looking at the history of Search Console, it started off as Webmaster Tools. Google started adding a bunch of features to it. It became Google Search Console. It was still the same platform. And then in 2017, Google released a beta version of the new Google Search Console, which is a totally different interface, much better user experience, much improved. A lot of the features are the same as the old Google Search Console, but some of them have not yet been migrated. And here's a list of the features that were in the old Google Search Console that have not quite made it over to the new one. With that being said, we do expect to see most of these migrated in the near future, hopefully. So let's dive into what a proper Google Search Console setup looks like. And so as I mentioned, if we don't properly set up Google Search Console, we're going to not be dealing with the best data possible. And therefore, we're not going to be able to take the right actions that we need to be taking to improve our search results. And so in order to establish that line of communication between you and Google, what you need to do is verify your site. And Google gives you two options to verify your site, using your domain or using the URL prefix. Now, the domain verification is a relatively new feature. But what it allows you to do is upload a text file to your domain hosting provider and put that text file in the DNS records. And that's going to allow Google to see every version of your site associated with that particular domain. And that's really helpful, because it's going to give you the most comprehensive view of all the versions of your site that exist. So if you can, I highly recommend you start by verifying your site or your client's sites using domain first. And if you can't verify using the domain, if you don't have access to your domain host, you can use the URL prefix. And this is where you're going to plug in the canonical version or the definitive version of your site. So if it's HTTP, TTP, S-dub-dub-dubs, you want to make sure that that's the exact version you put in there, so that you're focusing on that definitive version of your site. And Google is giving you data about that. That being said, Google also wants you to include all versions when you're verifying using the URL prefix. So include just the HTTPS, no-dubs, the HTTP. Google asks for all of those, but the most important one to get in there is the definitive version. Or, like I recommended to start, use the domain verification. That's going to make it easy and simplify everything for you. Next thing you want to do is add permissions. So this is going to give other people on your teams or your clients access to going here and look at what's going on. There's three different levels of permissions. Owner, full user, and restricted. Owner has access to everything. They can look at all data and take all actions, add more users. Full users can see all data and take most actions. And restricted can just see data. If you're working with a large team or you have a lot of people who want access, be careful giving out those owner permissions. That can get a little bit exciting and add to a lot of confusion if you just give those out willy-nilly. One other thing we recommend you do is connect it to your Google Analytics. This is going to allow you to see your Google Search Console insights, your performance in Search Console, directly within Analytics. And that means you can go into Analytics and not have to jump back and forth between Google Search Console and Analytics to see that information. It's going to be right there in your acquisition report showing you how you're getting traffic from organic search. And you can do that by going into Google Analytics, clicking on Settings and going to the Admin, using that property column in the view in the middle and selecting All Products, Finding Search Console, and then linking the two. Google will walk you through a dialogue that will allow you to connect those. The last thing you need to do for a proper setup is submit a clean XML sitemap. And what this is going to do is tell Google all the pages on your site that you want it to know about and you want it to show in search results. And so a clean sitemap means that your XML sitemap is free of thin and duplicate content, thin content, being content that doesn't really add any values for users. It doesn't make the internet a better place. It's like leftover theme files or pages with nothing on them. So make sure all of that is removed from your sitemap before you submit it to Google. And duplicate content, that's the exact same content living underneath two different URLs. You want to make sure that you add canonical tags if you have that happening from the non-definitive content to the canonical version. And then also make sure just the canonical content, the definitive version of that content, that URL is what's in your sitemap. So the four actions you need to take to properly set up Google Search Console. You're going to verify your site, ideally using that domain verification. Then you're going to add permissions, being careful of who you give those ownership permissions to if you have a lot of users. You can connect it to Google Analytics if you're going to find that to be helpful. And then find that information in acquisition. And finally, submit that clean sitemap for your thin and duplicate content. So now let's get into what some of the most useful tools and reports within the new version of Google Search Console are. So when you sign into the new version of Google Search Console for the first time, this is what you're going to see. If for some reason you don't see this left-hand menu just hit that little hamburger up top, that's going to pop it out for you. But this is going to be your overview page, which is essentially your dashboard. You're going to have a little synopsis of your performance report, your coverage report. And what's cut off right here is your enhancements report down at the bottom. So that's going to be a snapshot of how each of those are doing at any given point in time. And then you have all the different functionalities which we're going to dive into over here in the menu. Up top, you have your URL inspection tool, which we're going to talk about, and then also your little help icon question mark over there in the top right. The first thing you want to do when you jump in here is make sure you pick the right property. We once had a client call us, and they were a little bit freaked out because they thought all of their organic traffic had completely fallen off the map. Come to find out, we start talking to them, find out they're in Search Console, but they were just looking at the wrong property. Everything was fine, and so they had a little heart attack for no reason just because they were looking at the wrong property. Start by selecting the right property up there in the top left-hand corner. So if you want to be seeing information for HTTPS, www.pointerpointer.com, make sure it's the HTTPS, www version that you're looking at in your properties. All right, so let's talk about what that URL inspection tool is up top and what it's going to do for you. First of all, it's going to tell you if a page on your site or the URL, if that is actually in Google's index, if Google knows about that page. It's going to tell you how Google figured out about that page, whether you submit it in your site map or discovered it using links elsewhere on the web, when it was last crawled, if it's properly able to be properly indexed, and importantly, if it's mobile-friendly. I'll talk about this a couple of times in this talk, but Google crawls everything as if it were a mobile device first, so all of your pages have to be mobile-friendly. And if it's not, Google's going to tell you about it right there when you plug in a particular URL into the inspection tool. Another great feature about the inspection tool is your ability to request indexing. And that's what I have in that little box on the top right. Any time you're making changes to your content on your site, you improve your content and you want Google to know about it, come in here, throw that URL in the inspection tool, and then click on Request Indexing. That's going to send Google's crawlers right out to re-crawl your content and make sure it's properly indexed in its newest, latest form. So you can use the URL inspection to see if your pages are in the index, individual pages. If the pages can be crawled, if they're mobile-friendly, you'll also be able to identify and fix errors that Google has found with those individual pages. And lastly, use that feature to request indexing once you've made changes to your content. It's usually pretty quick, and it depends on how much other stuff Google has going on, like what else is trying to crawl, but it's usually the same day, so. Yes, sir. All right. So the next piece of this, do you have a question over there, sir? You don't need to do it once a month only when you're making changes to your content. Yeah, the easier thing to do would be, if they're making a lot of changes, resubmit your sitemap on the regular basis, the XML sitemap. That would be my recommendation there. All right, let's talk about what these enhancements are. So the enhancements reports are gonna look different for everybody. So everybody's search console's gonna look different underneath enhancements. Most everybody's gonna see mobile usability, but it's gonna depend on which kind of, what elements of your site are optimized for rich results. And those elements of your site that are optimized for rich results, this is where Google's gonna report on those and tell you how they're performing in search. So it depends on how many of those you have on your site. That's what you're gonna be able to see in access here. I'm not gonna get into this too much in depth today because it is so diverse, depending on every site, but that's what this report is looking at. The one I did mention is mobile-friendly. So when you're in there, mobile usability underneath enhancements, that's gonna tell you how many of your pages Google has seen as mobile-friendly and how many are not. Right now, this is 15 pages of mobile-friendly, zero or not mobile-friendly. This is a good place to get that aggregate view of how your site as a whole is on a mobile-friendly basis. So go in here and make sure all your pages are mobile-friendly if you want them appearing in search. Next, let's talk about security and manual actions right underneath that. What is this? So what are manual actions? Manual actions are when Google goes and crawls the pages on your site and sees you doing something sketchy, or in Google's words, something shady. Here's a long list of shady actions that you can take that are gonna get a manual action flag in Google Search Console. And when this happens, typically Google's crawlers will see something sketchy going on on your site, and then it'll have one of its employees take a look at it, they'll say, yep, that looks shady, so we're gonna take a manual action, pull that out of search results. So it can be any of these things, cloaking, scraped content, that's when you take content from other sites, put it on yours, abusing rich snippets, sketchy links, so Google can see a lot of that stuff, so the bottom line is don't be shady, and you should never have a problem, these are rare. If you're just operating a business and you're not trying to manipulate search results, you'll probably never see a manual action, so you don't need to worry about these too much. But in an event you do, you can find out more about it, Google will tell you what's going on in this report, you can go fix the issue and then request a review so that it will remove the flag and you'll be able to get that page back in search results. And Google's also able to see security issues on your site when it's crawling it, and so there's all sorts of different issues, it can see malware on your site, hacked pages, social engineering attacks, there's a lot of things that is able to identify when it's crawling, and then when it sees those, it will notify you in your security issues. It's also gonna give you information about how to go fix those, and then you can fix them, come back in here and request a review to let Google know that these pages are good to go, there's no security issues anymore, and they can continue to appear in search results. So, hopefully we never see anyone with manual actions or security issues in an ideal world that would be the case. One very basic security issue I wanna make sure all of you are addressing and you have all addressed for your clients is making sure they're switched over to the HTTPS protocol. If they're still on HTTP, it's not doing them any favors in search results, and there will be a little boost in rankings, their ability to rank, if they do switch over. So, dangle that little SEO care in front of them if they're resistant to making the switch, if they don't want to invest in it or whatever, tell them that it's gonna improve their way their site is able to appear in search. So, now let's dive into the coverage report. And when it comes to coverage, what we're talking about is technical SEO. This is Google telling us what it knows about the pages on our site and how it has them cataloged within its index essentially. And so you can access the coverage report in two different places within the new search console right up there in the top left or you're also gonna see the snapshot of how your coverage is performing, how many of your pages have the valid indexation status. You can click report or open report in that as well to access this coverage report. And so coverage, as I mentioned, is Google telling us what it knows about our pages, which are appearing in search and which are not. And let's take a step back for a second and talk about how Google indexes stuff and what indexation actually is. So when it comes to indexation, I like to think of the metaphor of a library. In this instance, the library is the web. Google is a librarian, the index is a card catalog. The information Google has about each one of our pages is one of those cards in the card catalog. And the books are all of our web pages. And so when a searcher goes into the library or when a searcher goes into the web and they go up to Google and say, hey, can I have the best book on this particular topic? Google's gonna go to its index, that card catalog. And it's gonna consult all the information it has about that particular topic. And it's gonna see which of the pages is the best, which book it has that is the best on that topic. It's gonna go and get that book or that page and return it to the search, the searcher or the library patron. So when you're trying to think about how the index works in Google, try to think of that metaphor. I find it to help simplify things. And one thing to keep in mind is that Google's not indexing websites as a whole and ranking those in search results. It's indexing and ranking the individual pages on our sites. And so as a result, each one of those pages has the ability to perform in search, not our website as a whole. Sure, our homepage can perform and Google will index that, but not our website as a whole. That is unless your site is a single page like thebestdinosaur.com. In that case, Google would index your website as a whole because it's one page. So within the coverage report, it's broken down into two main sections. Integ, indexation statuses presented in a chart. And then a details and reasons table below that. And in order to show these indexation statuses, you have to make sure each one of them is highlighted. So each one of those rectangles up there, you have to click on it to highlight it and chart it. And then also show the details about that indexation status in the table below. The details and reasons table. As you can see, we have our indexation statuses here on the left-hand side. And for each one, there can be multiple types of reasons that indexation status is what it is. If we have issues, Google's gonna let us know if we started the validation process on those issues. And it's also gonna show us how many pages are marked with a particular type of indexation status. Let's just take errors, for example. And so if we were to click errors, that would show the details about the errors we're experiencing. Here we have submitted URL not found. We can then click on that type of error to get into a coverage drill down report. So this is where Google's telling us how many pages have that submitted URL not found error occurring on them. Here we only have one instance. So we only have one page listed down here in the examples. If we have multiple pages, those would all be listed there in examples. And we could click on those pages and Google's gonna pop out this little toolbar on the right-hand side and give us some tools to work with to figure out why that particular page is marked that way. It will allow us to go inspect that URL and test it out. And then that will give us more information about why that page is marked, submitted URL not found. And so let's talk about what some of these different indexation statuses are to help clarify that a little bit. So errors, these are issues Google is having with the pages on your site that are preventing those pages from appearing in search results. You need to fix these errors before the pages associated with them are actually gonna appear in search results. So we'd highlight that, see what errors are occurring, and then ideally go fix those pages. The next status is valid with warning. And these are pages that are likely appearing in search results, but Google's taking an issue with them for some reason and wants you to go improve them. It says, hey, you can be doing better here and it's gonna tell you what you can do to actually improve those pages. So valid with warning is the second one over there. And both with your errors and your valid with warning, take action by going out and fixing whatever issues Google's telling you about. And in order to do that, here's the process you can follow. So once you have your errors or your valid with warning highlighted, you can click down to get to the coverage drill down report. And once you're in this coverage drill down report, you can start by learning more about what that actual error is or why a valid with warning issue is occurring. And do that by clicking on learn more. That's gonna take you straight to Google's documentation. We're just gonna say, hey, this is what's happening. This is what a submitted URL not found is and why it's occurring. As I mentioned, you're gonna have the actual pages listed down underneath examples. So the second step is to click into your pages and then see what tools Google's giving you on the right hand side there to investigate. And you wanna go investigate those pages, use the tools Google gives you to figure out why that issue is occurring. Once you've figured out what that issue is by learning more and why it's occurring by using those tools to investigate it, you're gonna fix the issue. Once you fix the issue, come back in here to the coverage report, validate the fix, the final step right there. And that's gonna tell Google that you fix the issue. You can go crawl and check the work you've done to make sure it is resolved. And so that's for both your errors and your valid with warning. No, no issue there. Yeah, Google will just tell you to redo it. So SEO jargon and things in Google support can sometimes get a little bit technical. Here's some tools, helpful tools you can use to make sense of all of that. Starting with the learn more. Like I was saying that that's a really helpful function. It's gonna take you straight to Google's documentation where it's gonna make sense of the issue that is occurring. Next, I want you to use these little question mark icons within Google Search Console to figure out what's going on. That little question mark icon is gonna tell you what's happening with the different elements within Search Console. That's gonna help you make sense of the functionalities that you're looking at and what all of these functionalities do. Also don't be afraid to use that help icon on the top right hand corner. That's gonna take you straight to Google's documentation related to the exact page you're on. It's extremely intuitive. So if we're looking at submitted URL mark no index, Google's gonna take us directly to that in its documentation, its help documentation when we click on that question mark icon. Another really helpful resource is the Moz Learning Center. We're just going to Moz and typing in whatever terms you're questioning within Google, say mark no index. You can type that into search in Moz.com and it's gonna give you information either in its learning center right here or in the Moz SEO glossary. And so that's another place you can start to make sense of what some of these SEO terms are and these technical ideas are. Also don't be afraid to Google it. I often see people never think to do this step in the process but just copy exactly what Google's telling you. So in this instance, submitted URL mark no index. I'd copy that from Google, paste it into, or from Google search console, paste it into Google and see what kind of information I get back. There's definitely gonna be some videos, some forums and some articles telling you exactly how you can go fix that issue. So very straightforward step to take there. Maybe do that first. That might simplify things. Okay, there's two more indexation statuses we did not discuss. Valid and these are a success. These are the pages on your site that are appearing in search results. 138 pages here are appearing in search results and we see how Google found out about them that they weren't submitted and indexed and if they're just indexed but they weren't submitted in our site map. Those are pages that have found about using links out there on the web most likely. So these are pages that are in search. These are a win for you as long as they are pages that you don't want in search. So make sure none of your pages that you don't want in search have found their way in here to being marked as valid. Also monitor this report for any spikes or drops which can denote indexation issues. So spikes or drops and make sure no sneaky pages you want excluded are in there. And the final type of indexation status, yes sir. Yep, you just click on it and that's going to take you right to that coverage drill down report where it's going to show you all the examples and those are all the pages that are going to be indexed. Those are, yes, it will show you those pages that were not in the site map. Excluded, these are pages that are intentionally, hopefully excluded from Google search results and there's all sorts of reasons that Google will exclude pages from search results and hopefully that you excluded pages from search results and you will see a lot of those here. Make sure none of the pages that you want marked as valid in search console have found their way into excluded. That means they're not going to show up. Also make sure you fix your 404s with redirects. Same thing goes for soft 404s. When it comes to coverage, I like to think of this a place for everything and everything in this place. When everything's in this place in our coverage report, Google is going to be able to make sense of it and properly display all of our pages in search results and so that's our goal. So here's what you can do to take action with the coverage report. Fix pages that have errors, pages that are marked valid with warning. Ensure all your valid pages should actually be valid and those sneaky pages you want excluded are showing up as valid and then make sure none of your pages on the flip side that you want appearing in search have been marked as excluded. And then finally, use some of those tools I mentioned. Google it, usemoz.com and don't be afraid to use Google's documentation with the in-search console to learn more about why things are the way they are. All right, so next is talk about performance and I love performance. Where we were talking about technical SEO with coverage, we were talking about on-site optimization with our performance and you can access it up there in the top left or by clicking on open report in your overview. And so the performance report is going to quantify how our pages are performing in search results for whatever given period of time we have selected which can be up to 16 months with the new search console. And in the words of Grace Hopper, an accurate measurement is worth 1,000 expert opinions and Google is telling us what it knows. So this is data directly from Google. It's kind of the best we have and that's why SEOs love Google search consoles so much is because this is straight from a horse's mouth. So when it comes to the performance report when we click into that, this is what we're gonna see and it's broken down into three main sections. We have our filters up top, our metrics and then our dimensions. And so the start by talking about our filters and sorry, I'll pop back. Our filters appear in two different places. So up top and there's also this little sneaky filters over there where we can sort by queries and our metrics. We have three types of filters that are gonna allow us to sort our data within the performance report. So our search type, our date and then we can search by the, I mean sort by the different dimensions that we have available. So search type, that's either gonna be web searches, image searches or video searches. Those are our three options there. Our date can go all the way up to 16 months ago and that can also allow us to compare two date ranges to one another to see how we're performing in search over two different periods of time. And then we can add our dimensions, our queries which are the keywords our site is getting found for or our pages are getting found for. The pages are our pages on our site. The country where people are searching for us or rather where people are searching for the terms that we're appearing in search results for. And then devices, what kind of devices they're using to search. Desktop, mobile devices or tablets. And then as I was saying down in that little sneaky filters in the dimensions table you can sort by queries and then also your metrics. And so our metrics are right there in the middle and they're in that chart. And when it comes to our metrics they operate very much the same way our indexation statuses did in the coverage report. You have to highlight each one of those rectangles, click on it until it turns the color to chart it and then also for it to show up over here in the dimensions table. You can see our clicks, impressions, CTR and position. All four of those are showing up because all four of those are highlighted. If we clicked average position and de-highlighted it position would disappear from that table. And so what are our metrics? So these are what enable us to measure how we're appearing in search. And total clicks is how many people are actually clicking through to our site from search results. Total impressions are how many times our site or our pages are appearing in search results. The average click through rate is the percentage of those times it appeared in search. What percentage of the time did people actually click through to our site? An average position, that's an average of where we're appearing in search. So that's our ranking. Is the easiest way to think about that. And this information automatically is aggregated for our entire site. So although Google has information for every single one of our pages it aggregates all that information right here automatically in the performance report. So when you go in there for the first time that's what you're looking at. If you add a page as a filter you'll be looking at that information for a particular page. And let's talk about what's going on in our dimensions table down here. So we have a few different dimensions starting with queries. So queries are on the far left here those are the search terms for the keywords that we are being discovered for in search results. Our pages are gonna give us information about how each one of our pages on our site are appearing in search results. Countries once again that's where people are searching for the keywords related to our site where we're actually appearing in search. The devices that are using in search appearance that's gonna give you information about how you're appearing in rich results. And that's not available for everybody if for some reason you don't have elements that are able to appear in rich results that might not appear in here. But in order to use the dimensions table you're gonna click on queries for example and that's gonna list all the queries that your site is showing up for in search. So if we did that that would aggregate all those queries together for all the pages on our site and give us information for that site as a whole. So these are all the keywords that site is performing for. You can also see rows per page by default that's gonna be 10. It can often be helpful to drop it down to 25 or 50 when you're looking at this. I think it goes up to 250 but often that much can be overwhelming. 25 is probably a good place to start. And when we're looking at the performance report we also like to recommend that people use 12 months of data. That's kind of like the best date range to work with. Google by default will show you three months but 12 is gonna give you a little bit more of a holistic picture. And so when we're looking at our queries dimension we can see that for Aspen guide service 14 people clicked through to our site from search. It was shown, our site was shown 297 pages from our site we're showing 297 times in search results. 4.7% of those 297 people clicked through to it. And on average those pages ranked 1.5 for that particular search term or keyword. And if we are able, if we clicked over the pages that's gonna list all our pages sorted by clicks by default, high to low and that's gonna show us which of our pages are performing the best in search. How many impressions are getting how many times they've appeared in search and all those other good metrics right there. You can click over to impressions or click through rate if you wanna sort using those metrics. Yes, typically you're looking for a lower number because if you're ranking position one you're gonna be at the very top. One through 10 is first page 11 to 20 you're looking at second page and anything below that you're probably not getting found. But that being said, remember that this is aggregate data most of the time or actually when we're looking at our pages it's not. So this page, Aspen Guide Service, our homepage is performing position 26.1 but that's for a ton of different queries. And until you added a particular query as a filter you wouldn't know the exact performance of that page for a particular keyword. So that's why all this filtering is extremely helpful here in Search Console. Yes. You would do that up top. We'll take a look at how you can do that a little bit. Let's get into some of this improvement and optimization because this has been a little bit dry if we've been poking around giving you a lay of the land but here's some actual stuff you can go home and do to improve the way you're ranking. So I imagine a lot of you have selected a focus keyword and plugged it into Yoast and then hopefully your content is performing for that focus keyword. That happens all the time but even the best most seasoned SEOs don't select the best focus keyword right off the bat. And so as a result what we can do is come into our performance report and find a better focus keyword or find out if our original focus keyword is performing the way we want it to. So we're gonna start by highlighting all of our metrics so that we have all the information about our pages. And so what we're doing here we're trying to see if for an individual page we have the best focus keyword possible. And then so once those are highlighted it's gonna show us our metrics. We're gonna click on pages in the dimensions table. What that's gonna do is gonna show us all the pages on our site and how they are performing based on clicks by default. And so let's take this one for example the second one down. This is an article about XML site maps for WordPress. You see it's had 977 clicks, 180,000 impressions and it's ranking 30.4 because that's for all the different keywords that that shows up in search results for. So sometimes it might show up number one sometimes it might show up number 100. But when we click on that page so if we're in our pages in dimensions if we actually click on that page that's gonna automatically add it as a filter up top. This is that page added as a filter. And once it's added as a filter we can click back over to queries to see all the keywords that that page is performing for. And we see that this particular article is performing the best for Yoast SEO site map Yoast site map and site map Yoast. Those are keywords that are driving clicks and impressions. And so that means Google likes our piece of content for those particular keywords. However, something tells me that that wasn't the actual focus keyword that we wanted that piece of content to perform for. We originally picked XML site map for WordPress as our focus keyword. But when we were just looking at that data in the queries, XML site map for WordPress doesn't show up anywhere. Google doesn't like that piece of content for that particular focus keyword. It likes it for XML site map but kind of in a fourth page rankings kind of way which doesn't really do us all that much good. I mean, it is sending some traffic and clicks but what we do know is that Google does really like this article for Yoast SEO site map. And so we can use that insight to go improve our focus keyword on that page. And so what we would do is substitute our keyword that is not performing for a new keyword that is performing already or that that article is performing well for. And when we do that, Google is much more likely to say, oh, hey, this article is about Yoast SEO site maps even more now because we're sending in stronger signals that this, that's what we want this particular article to be ranked for. And so when you switch out focus keywords in your content, what you can do is put them in the title tag, your meta description, your page title or H1, somewhere towards the top of the page, ideally in the first paragraph of a copy, in alt text on images on that page, sprinkled throughout your copy and in some internal links elsewhere on your site pointing back to that page. After we've done this, we're gonna go use the URL inspection tool to tell Google to re-index this page. So we're gonna put that in, request indexing, Google's gonna send us crawlers out and see those improvements we've made to this page. And I did this a couple of weeks ago just to see if we could get a little bump and we see that our click through rate improved, 0.3%, not terribly substantial. I didn't really improve the content beyond just switching out the focus keyword. So if I had, we'd probably see more of a bump, but the click through rate improved just a little bit and our position jumped up to 6.7 from 7.4. So it can have a pretty immediate impact on how your content is able to rank. However, if your focus keyword is already performing great, then you don't wanna switch it out. You can keep letting it roll. So in order to take action with this particular tactic, you're gonna highlight all those metrics, add your pages of filter, click the queries dimension to see what keywords that page is ranking for or appearing in search results for and which keywords are sending traffic to the site, identify a good substitute keyword. If your focus keyword isn't performing, if it is, you can just leave it. Integrate new keyword into your page, all those places we just discussed, and then request indexing. And also, this will be available, this slide deck will be available at pathfinderseo.com, forward slash WCAVL. So you will be able to get that there if you need these down the road. All right, so we've improved our focus keywords. I wanna talk about improving the supporting keywords in our content. So when it comes to supporting keywords, we refer to these in the SEO space as semantically related keywords. And these are basically ideas that are related to our focus keywords. So SEO site map has semantically related keywords, Yoast site map, Yoast XML site map, and so on. Asheville has semantically related keywords like the Biltmore, North Carolina, Breweries. So these are basically just ideas that go together. And so what we can do is use our queries report for a particular page. When we add that page as a filter and see what keywords it's performing for, we can see what other ideas Google likes this piece of content for. And so we see that Yoast XML site map is a semantically related keyword or a supporting keyword that Google is also sending us traffic for. We're saying, hey guys, here's a great article about Yoast XML site maps. The same thing essentially as Yoast SEO site maps, but synonyms. But what we can do is integrate these other keywords into our content or make sure they're integrated in there and then expand upon the ideas that those keywords relate to. So we'd wanna make sure this piece of content is actually talking about how to create a site map with Yoast in the article about Yoast SEO site maps. Cause that's an idea people wanna know about. So we need to make sure we touch on it in our actual content. Yoast site map URL. We'd wanna tell people exactly what the Yoast site map URL is so that they can go find it on their site. So use these semantically related keywords to make sure your content is comprehensive and more definitive. That's gonna give it a much better chance of ranking and search results cause Google's gonna see all of those keywords talked about in your article and say, hey, this is a great piece of content. Couple other places you can find these semantically related keywords. You can do an image search for Yoast SEO site map, for example. You can see some semantically related keywords that you could add as supporting keywords in your content. Or you can do a Google Suggest search. So you search for Yoast SEO site map and then click back into the search bar and it's gonna show you all these other terms that people are searching for at the same time they're trying to learn about that particular idea. And then you can select a few of those. Ideally starting with the ones that are appearing in queries and then expand upon them, integrate those keywords and the ideas that are about into your content to improve it and make it more attractive to both users and Google. So when it comes to your semantically related keywords, here's how you can take action so you can identify those supporting keywords in your queries report, then go into your piece of content and see if they're already there. Maybe you already talked about them, in which case you're set. And if you didn't talk about them, add that particular keyword that was showing up in queries into your content and expand upon the idea that it's about. That keyword is related to. And make sure you do this naturally. You don't wanna just throw them in there in a hacky kind of way because that's not gonna help anyone. Google and us, we're all trying to make the internet a better place so when you naturally integrate these, Google is more likely to reward you. All right, so we're closing in on it here and I wanna talk about one more tactic and how you can use Google Search Console to act upon it. So I want you to be able to build ranking power and spread it throughout your site using Google Search Console. And you can do that in part by looking at the links report and it's down in the bottom left-hand corner. So when you go to the links report, what Google's gonna show you is the pages on your site, those that have the most external links pointing to them from other websites around the internet. That's top-linked pages. Top-linked sites, top-linking sites are those sites that are sending the most links your way. Top-linking text is the anchor text of those links that are pointing at your site. Then the internal links, that's gonna show you the pages on your site and how many internal links each one of those pages has pointing at them. Ideally, you want your most important pages to have the highest number of internal links, your least important pages to have the lowest number of internal links. But what you can do to improve your ranking power and then spread it is start by doing some link-building. So say you own the website, ihatesalanchro.com. There's a lot of ways to do link-building, there's like thousands of tactics, but we like to recommend you start by leveraging your business relationships. And an easy way to do that is by creating a spreadsheet like this where you identify your partners, your affiliates, organizations and certifications you have, some of your top customers, nonprofits you help out, prominent leaders on your team, podcasts and news media. And then where you have these relationships, list them out underneath here in each column. And then you wanna go to each one of those relationships and say, hey, we have a great partnership or we worked on this project together. Would you mind throwing a link our way? Here's a great place you can put it on your website. When you leverage your business relationships to build those links, that's some of the lowest hanging fruit in the link-building game. So we go to cilantrosucks.org and say, hey guys, we're in this together. Can you please send a link our way and we'll do the same, send one back your way. Or we might go to, say, thekitchen.com because they wrote an article about our funny website because not all people love cilantro and say, hey, thanks for writing that article. Can you make sure you link back to us? So leverage your business relationships to start with a link-building strategy. Then once you have those internal links pointing at your site, see which pages have the most incoming links. Those are gonna be your most powerful pages. They have the most link equity coming from those other websites, flowing through those links. So link equity is ranking power, link juice, as we call it in SEO. Those pages with most external links pointing at them are gonna have the best ability to perform in search. They also have the ability to send some of that linking power, that ranking power that they're getting from those other sites to other pages on our site that might be a little bit deeper. And so what we can do when we know which of our pages are performing the best is create or build internal links to pages that we're looking to boost a little bit. And so if we identified some pages that we wanna boost in search results, we wanna give them a little bit more ranking power. We could build some internal links from our homepage or that XML site map article pointing at those pages that we're looking to boost. Now you don't wanna build a ton of links because that's gonna dilute all your ranking power, but maybe a half dozen at most. It's kind of like if you have four links on a page, all those pages internally that those links are pointing at are gonna be getting 25% of that ranking power sent to them. So if you have a ton of links, you're gonna be really diluting that and not really achieving the end result you would want to by building those internal links. Yes, sir. If there's somebody here that's a search engine business and they wanna build that affiliation with you once your decision criteria, if you get a request, do you generally accept? If we should link to their page? Yes, and it's not a type of relationship. It really depends on what that relationship looks like. If we have a good partnership or trying to bolster that partnership, we will often very easily send a link their way because it's very helpful and maybe we'll send one back our way. So it is a case by case basis. It's kind of just hard to take a broad brush when approaching that, but yeah, if you'd like to talk to me about that a little bit more in depth, we could jump into the happiness bar and take a look at some specific examples. Yes, ma'am. As many externally as possible internally, keep the number relatively low. Ideally, if you're trying to boost other pages, otherwise you're gonna totally dilute your ability to send that ranking power throughout your site. So the fewer, the better, because that's really gonna push more of that ranking power through. Right, they give you, like, right. Okay, yes. This goes back, I didn't wanna interrupt you, but I was just thinking in my mind, I don't know how this is possible, but on your way to get flagged in the search engine for doing something wrong. Manual actions, yes, ma'am. It said abuse and rich snippets. I was thinking, how can you abuse a rich snippet? I don't know, I put in any content that doesn't match your site or I don't understand. I don't know, I never abuse rich snippets. I hold rich snippets in very high regard. So I always try to treat them with as much respect as possible. I don't know exactly how folks are doing that. Maybe it's writing some hacky JSON-LD that they're trying to get them ranking better and rich snippets. I don't know how to do that. Might be a black hat SEO tactic. I try to keep it on the white hat side of things. So that could be. So yes. All right, so take action when it comes to building links. Identify those link building opportunities using a spreadsheet. Leverage your business relationships to start out. That's the lowest hanging fruit. Build more of those links. Identify the pages that have the most link equity ranking power flowing into them from externally on the web. And then build internal links that are going to send some of that ranking power to pages on your site that you want to boost. And that's going to set you up for success with some of that link building. And so we're closing in on it here. I want to leave you with this one. Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, let that wave of stress wash over you like we were talking about. Do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. And that's why I gave you all these sections to take action. These are things you can actually go home and do. And the more of them you do, the better off you're going to be. You're going to give your site a much better chance of appearing in search results. And that's ultimately going to drive more qualified traffic to your site, which is going to create more revenue for you and your clients. And so my name is Eric Cordell. I'm an SEO coach and marketing director at Pathfinder SEO. And what we do is offer a guided SEO service, which combines tools, an SEO process to follow, and then monthly coaching to help you get your site or your client's sites found. And we offer that to site owners and freelancers, also agencies. So if you have any interest in learning more about that, you can check out Pathfinder SEO. And also you can get these slides at PathfinderSEO.com, WCAVL, or you can get 25% off your first three months of Pathfinder. So thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. And as I said, I will.