Now that you have Google Search Console set up on your site you can start to use it to further your SEO efforts and gain more traffic from organic search.

Don’t have Google Search Console set up yet? Learn how here. Then come back and read this post so you know how to use the information once it populates!

How to Use Google Search Console to Rank Higher in Search

To get started you need to head over to Google Search Console.

Choose Search Traffic from the menu on the left sidebar. Then choose Search Analytics from the drop down menu.

On this page you can see all of the search terms people have used to land on your site. Along the top you will see a series of check boxes for clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. Go ahead and select all of those.

Now you should have a list of terms along with the numbers of clicks and impressions you received for those terms, the click through rate, and your rank in google for that term.

You can use this information in a variety of ways:

Use Impressions to Target Better Keyword Phrases

If you click the word impressions you can sort the information by impressions. It is sometimes helpful to filter your queries to one topic first by clicking on no filter under QUERIES and adding your target words.

For example, below is my queries filtered for the word fleas. I would like to get my article on how to get rid of fleas naturally to rank higher in search.

Looking at this data I can tell that, if I am not already, I might want to target the term how to get rid of fleas naturally as opposed to some of the terms that receive less impressions.

I could also add a couple of the other phrases into my article to rank higher for more than one of the terms.

Related Reading: 4 Free SEO Tools for Bloggers

Using Position to Better SEO Your Articles

You can also use the position information to help you decided which articles still need work in the SEO department.

To do this, I click on the Position tab to order the queries by position. I click it twice so that it starts with the lowest ranked terms. Then I look for words that are ranking in the 7-10 range to start. These are ones that I want to really work on to get them to hopefully rank in the top 3- since those are more likely to get the clicks!

When doing this I look for queries that have a low-ish rank but are getting lots of impressions. That tells me that this term is used a lot and I should spruce up my post to target these words. Doing this allows me to find long forgotten posts that are in need of a remake.

Above the keyword is oregano uses. I know exactly which post is ranking for this phrase, and I know I haven’t looked at it at least a couple of years. Now I might take this new information and repeat the previous step of filtering the queries by the word oregano and seeing what I find.

Then I can go back into this old post and polish it up with better SEO and see if I can get that rank of 9.4 much higher.

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Using Google Search Console for Post Ideas

Another way to use Google Search Console is to use the information to create NEW content that links back to existing posts that are already ranking for terms.

For example:

When I look through my queries I notice that I am getting a lot of searches for about ticks. I am even ranking #1 for a couple of them. I do not currently have a post that has anything to do with ticks- only a high ranking post on guinea fowl that has one sentence in it about guineas eating ticks.

But looking at this information, I might want to consider adding a post about what birds eat ticks or controlling ticks on the homestead. Then when I link back to my high ranking post I automatically get a little boost for that new post in terms of SEO.

Plus all of the people that land on my first article might be more likely to click through and read my new post as well.

And that’s it! 3 completely free ways to boost the SEO of your current content using Google Search Console!