Interpreting and Actioning on Google Search Console Data

Google Search Console is one of the best SEO tools made for some use cases. It’s literally from Google’s data. It blows my mind when I see people utilizing paid SEO tools for their own site when they have the actual data on hand. When I say actual data, I mean less sampled than other tools.

Let me give you an example. SEMRush has no data on the keyword “bowtiedopossum”. When I go to GSC and check how many impressions and clicks I have for the last 3 months, it’s 95 and 46 respectively.

The reason for this is because all of these SEO tools use sampling. They get their data from clickstream data. This clickstream data isn’t from every browser on the planet so they’re forced to extrapolate the data. This can shift the data majorly up or down for low volume keywords and sites.

An extreme version of this is below. I can assure you that at no point has my Substack received 100k visitors in a month.

For today’s post, I’ll go over when it’s a good idea to use GSC vs SEO tools and how to do it.

Note: If you’re 10-15 pages into your website, go up to the top of the browser and hit the tiny X. None of this is going to help you if you haven’t been pushing out content.

Anchor Text

Let’s assume you did poor KW research, have some pages written from before you learned how to properly target KWs, or you’re running a Substack that’s not really made to target specific KWs.

The latter is the example we’re going to use. I didn’t intend for the WiFi Money post to rank for anything but when I saw that I was on the bottom of page 2 for the term “WiFi Money”, I had to do something.

If you accidently rank for something, you can double down on that KW. Utilize what Google thinks your post is about to strategically build anchor text within your ecosystem for that KW.