Even more reasons to use Google Search Console

Regular readers will know that we strongly recommend website owners set up a Google Search Console account. It’s free, easy to do and can provide invaluable information that will help improve the performance of your website.

Google has just given more reasons to do this with a number of enhancements:

• New comparison filters
  You can now get new insights by directly comparing the performance of different search queries; pages; countries; devices; and search types.

Above is the result of applying the “Compare Countries” filter (1) to compare traffic from Australia and NZ. In addition to seeing total clicks from each country for the period (2), there’s a graph showing performance over time (3) and below this, you can see how many clicks you got from each country for each search query (4). Further detail can be added by checking the Impressions, CTR, and Position boxes (5). Website name and search queries have been blurred for privacy reasons.
• Updated mobile report
  This has been revised to match the user-friendly interface of the new mobile friendly testing tool we highlighted a couple of weeks ago.
• Rich Results
  A new filter under the Search Appearance tab to view the performance of “rich search results”. These are things like rich cards and rich snippets which can show more information than standard search results. This report lets you see how any rich results you’ve got are performing compared to normal results — typically you can expect to see more clicks and a higher clickthrough rate.
• More than 90 days of data
  One of the limitations of Google Search Console is that it only shows the last 90 days of data. This means if you want to compare data over a longer period or year-on-year, you need to have been progressively archiving off data. The good news is that Gary Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) confirmed earlier this month that Google is actively working to provide more than 90 days of data.

Why should you care?

All these enhancements mean Google Search Console is an even more useful tool you can leverage to improve the performance of your website. If you have an account but haven’t logged in for a while we suggest you do and check out these new features.

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