The Google Console Content Strategy

  •   24th June 2020
  •   : Blog

Adding new content and pages to your site, if done in a certain way, can increase your SEO results in a number of ways…

1. Simply adding more on-topic, high-quality content makes the site bigger. If all other metrics are equal with your competitor for keyword X, but you have a bigger site, you will outrank them

2. Adding more on topic content re-enforces Google’s trust in the site and the topics covered

3. More content and pages / posts means more potential keywords rank

4. More content and pages hit Google’s site refresh algo, showing them you’re still in business

So now we know the benefits, there’s a very powerful way of picking what keywords to focus on when adding additional content. I say “additional” because this strategy should be done only once you have your main focus keywords confirmed, and they all have their own onpage optimised pages.

Here’s what you do….

1. Head into your Google console account, and click on performance on the left hand menu

2. Click on the date and change to “most recent date”

3. Click on “average position”

4. Now top right, click on “export” to excel file and download the excel

5. On the excel, add a filter and sort by lowest position at the top

6. Focus on position 5 to 20 for the maximum return on your time and effort on this (if you don’t yet have keywords at this level, you can do on positions 20+)

7. Based on user intention (the most important keyword metric, e.g. https://www.scott.services/the-importance-of-user-intention/), pick the keywords you feel have great user intention between positions 5 to 20 and make a list of these

8. On your list of keywords, check if you already have an exact url for them, e.g. site.com/exact-keyword-here – if you do, remove from the list

9. Make new pages / posts for the remaining keywords, using an exact url and high-quality original content that’s well optimised for the keyword (if you need a onpage report for this, please shout, we can help with these) or at the very least, ensure the basics are covered, i.e. https://www.scott.services/onpage-tips/ – and make the page / post – also make sure you do the “give Google want it wants” strategy on these pages / posts, i.e. https://www.scott.services/happy-google/

10. Now you want to link to the new page / post with your best pages. To do this, use tactic 1 here https://www.scott.services/the-internal-silo-strategy/, and once done, do a “URL inspector” on the new page / post you made and all those you edited to link to this. You can find how to do a URL inspector at the bottom of this page https://www.scott.services/the-internal-silo-strategy/

This strategy is best repeated as often as your regular content strategy allows.

Please note: You’ll notice I don’t once mention about search volumes or keyword difficulty, and there’s a very good reason. Keyword difficulty, from any tool, can only take public data from the competitors, such as their backlinks (unless they are blocking crawlers so tools can’t see the links), onpage html metrics, etc. What no tool or system can see, is the competitors’ a) user metrics i.e. click rate percentage from Google search, time on site, amount of pages the user views, bounce rate, return user rate, etc. and b) what Google thinks / trusts about the site, page and all the metrics within this.

So if we rank for a high user intention keyword between positions 5-20, and we don’t have an exact keyword url with a page / post focused on this, the fact we rank so high whilst having no optimised pages means Google loves “something” (from all the hidden metrics) about the site and / or page. So by making an exact url page / post with great content, great onpage metrics etc., Google can only trust us more. With this tactic, once Google has processed the changes (up to 2-3 months max) Google will trust us a lot more, especially if this is a regular task. You’re taking what Google loves about your site and keep making new pages and posts focused on those keywords with the internal interlinking strategy.

I also don’t talk about looking at search volumes for these keywords, because the fact that it’s on the Google console list means it’s getting some search volume, and not looking at search volumes ensures sometimes you’ll do this on low search keywords, sometimes higher search terms, etc., which is nice and natural. You don’t want Google seeing you only add new pages focusing on keywords that have X searches or more – that’s a footprint that Google RankBrain algo will pick up.

Any questions on this, please feel free to contact me, happy to help 😊

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