Using New Google Publisher Data To Improve SEO

Using New Google Publisher Data To Improve SEO

What new Google Search Console data helps with SEO?

Google Search Console CTR information

More historical search data for publishers

Impressions, CTR, and Average position for a specific query over the course of one year

This kind of info can provide help in establishing how SEO changes affect the overall performance of a URL — or the site as a whole — over the long-term. For example, you could look at a page to see how impressions, CTR, and position have changed over the course of the year and throughout multiple [Google Algorithm Change Rumors](https://blog.ezoic.com/preparing-google-algorithm-changes-2018/).
You can then go back into your CMS and monitor what changes were made to see if you want to make similar changes on other pages, or change something back if the change you made caused a decrease in impressions or average position.

How to compare changes to pages or posts in WordPress

Being able to see when you made changes — in your CMS — that correlate to improvements in things like _average position_ offers publishers the ability to scale successful changes across their site, or rollback things that caused major issues. This is an example of working smarter with new data.

Testing CTR and using visitor behavior to drive big SEO improvement

Go to old version of Search Console to Fetch As Google for now

Make sure to set a segment for Organic Search

You can mix this with organic landing page traffic data residing in Google Analytics to confirm that this is actually positively impacting traffic. If I see improvements in both data tools, I probably have a winner.
Additionally, I should probably also see how [visitor experiences](https://blog.ezoic.com/ux-metrics-changing-view-visitors/) are affected by these changes. I will want to ensure I am not attracting more traffic that is ultimately bouncing or having short sessions due to misleading content. [This can affect revenue and long-term SEO](https://blog.ezoic.com/navigation-bounces-affect-seo-digital-revenue/).

If there is a conflict between my Google Analytics data and my Google Search Console data, I may want to revisit my experiment. It is feasibly possible that I improve CTR and average search position but negatively impact search traffic to that page (i.e. perhaps I improved for certain search queries but lost position on my highest volume keyword).
This process can be rinsed and repeated for multiple pages.

Using new Google search data to create new content that will rank well

Wrapping it all up

This new Google publisher data is really valuable. If you can use it to drive data-driven decision making in your content strategy, I am confident you’ll see positive results in the next 6-8 months.
What do you think? What other cools things could you do with this new data from Google?