Google Search Console has a lot of useful information about your website. Now they also have a new report that gives you a quick overview of your website’s monthly progress.
We’re sharing the report from our lab site. We can see that the site received 39.5k impressions from Google. That is, the site was offered to people using Google search roughly 39,500 times. We see that 2.33k searchers clicked through to see a page at our website. Google Analytics tells us that 2,338 visitors came to our site through Google organic search in December, so this is a good match.
Note that both of those numbers are followed by “(web).” That means the impressions are showing up in ordinary web search, not special image or video searches. The number of video and image searches is given at the bottom of the report.
There were also 10 pages with first impressions — and that’s an estimate. What are first impressions? Google says, “Pages that were seen by a user in Search Results for the first time last month.” That’s not a particularly useful answer in this case, because we have largely abandoned our lab site (sob!) and had no new pages in December. The other reports of this type that we have received show 0 to 35 first impressions, with no clear connection between the number of new pages and the number of first impressions. We will look into this further and tell you more when we learn more.
Content achievements
Next up we see our “Content Achievements.” We like that term. These are the pages that had increased visits — not by percentage but by absolute numbers. So we see that our lesson plans for Olive the Other Reindeer had 119 more visits in December than in November, and that this was the page with the greatest number of additional visits.
We also see that our top growth pages for December are all Christmas lit lesson plans. So were our top performing pages. Also our top growing queries and our top performing queries. Suffice it to say that we got no surprises in this section of the report. We definitely got actionable data, though. We should keep our Christmas lit lesson plans updated, and add more.
In the other reports we received, we saw similar patterns. If you don’t keep up with your analytics, this section of the Search Console report should provide a quick source of guidance.
Audience insights
The report gives us some quick information about our audience, including the devices they use to visit us and the countries they come from. Note that these are just the visitors coming from Google search. You might see different patterns for your visitors via social media or referrals, for example.
We didn’t receive reports for all the properties we manage in the Search Console — at least not yet. So you might not have received a report for your property. Yet. If you don’t have your website connected with Google’s search console yet, you won’t receive one. We can help you set up your website in the Search Console. The new report is just one reason it’s worth doing.
Leave a Reply