How to Read Google Search Console Insights to Understand Your Audience and Content Performance

Intro

In the ongoing battle for search engine dominance, we need every tool we can get our hands on — especially when that tool is free and comes from the ‌people assigning search rankings.

That’s the gift Google gave the content marketing community with Google Search Console Insights. This new service provides easy-to-understand analytics that can tell you a lot about your content and the people viewing it.

Through Google Search Console Insights, you can level the playing field with SEO experts by accessing straightforward and actionable analytics.

But while Google designed the service to be simple, it has depth when you dive into the insights. When you know how to read your Google Search Console Insights results, you’ll uncover data that can improve your content marketing exponentially.

Want to know more? Read on!

What is Google Search Console Insights?

Google Search Console Insights is a relatively new service provided by Google. It helps website owners gain valuable information about their audiences and content.

In its official write-up on the service, Google said:

“Search Console Insights is a new experience tailored for content creators and publishers and can help them understand how audiences discover their site’s content and what resonates with their audiences. This new experience is powered by data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics.”

Search Console Insights provides website statistics and analyzes content performance from a technical perspective. It can also help you identify problems with the website and adapt the user experience for the betterment of all.

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It's a useful tool that creators, marketers, and SEO experts need and generally love. For example, Google Search Insights helps you determine how people from different walks of life are finding you.

For example, take healthcare consumers.

With the increasing rise of telehealth, online medical organizations use Google Search Console Insights to understand how customers access their website.

For instance, by targeting trending keywords, such as "online doctors" and "online therapist," telehealth professionals can receive valuable information on who finds them and what devices they’re using. They can also determine whether users found their content via organic search, social media, or referrals.

But this metric is only one of this free tool’s main benefits.

It also helps you:

• Identify content performance over time
• Check the performance of new content
• Check on what people are searching for when they find you
• See which sites are directing visitors to your content

Instead of listing analytics and letting you come to your own conclusions, this tool spells everything out for you.

Now let’s look at what these metrics can tell you about your audience.

What can Google Search Console Insights tell you about your audience and content?

In the following sections, we’ll examine the information you can gather from Google Search Console Insights and what it can tell you about your audience and content.

How the audience discovers your content

Google Search Console Insights can give you data on the devices people use to access your content.

Knowing how to interpret this particular insight can provide valuable information about your audience and how they interact with your website.

For example, understanding the results of its “Devices” and “Channels” data is essential, as not all audiences are the same or have the same behaviors.

For instance, if you’re marketing to college students with the keyword "paying for college," you’ll want to know how they access your content and what channels they’re coming from.

If you determine that most of your users are from a mobile browser, you can shift your marketing to target mobile platforms specifically. That might include running ads on mobile apps, creating your own app, and harnessing SMS marketing. It also means you should put more effort into your mobile user experience and screen sizes.

Then there are the platforms they’re using to find you. If most college students are finding you through Facebook Ads, then that’s where your primary focus should lie.

From this information, you can better allocate your marketing budget. If you’re getting next to nothing from organic search traffic, siphon some of the budget from that strategy and put more attention and money behind Facebook. You might also consider A/B testing PPC ads.

What’s your best-performing content?

Google Search Console Insights can tell you a lot about the content you’re putting out. Specifically, it can identify your best and worst-performing content.

This includes data on how many visits these pages get and how much time people spend on them.

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This metric provides rich insights you can use.

For instance, look at your top three best-performing content pages. What do they have in common? Next, examine your worst performers. What do they have in common?

It could be something as simple as subject matter, headlines, or overall length. Knowing what’s doing well and what’s not, can help you understand what your audience wants (and doesn't want) regarding content.

By analyzing this information, you can make informed decisions to enhance your site's operational excellence. For instance, you might discover that specific blog posts or articles on your website resonate particularly well with your target audience. By analyzing which keywords you’re ranking for with those articles, you can better focus and refine your SEO strategy.

What are people searching for before finding you?

Regarding search terms, Google Search Console Insights can help you determine what terms users were searching for before finding you.

This metric gives you a clear window into the search habits of your customers. By knowing what they’re searching for and which terms brought them to you, you can identify keywords that are paying off.

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In other words, if you see that you’re not getting hits from specific key terms you’re targeting, you’ll need to emphasize them going forward. Then, continue to analyze these results within the tool to see how you’re progressing.

What kind of content should you be writing?

Understanding your audience's behavior and how your content performs is critical to generating focused and compelling content.

By examining your traffic and the average time on the page, you’ll learn what kind of content your audience prefers.

Let’s say you’re getting a lot of hits on long-form content, but the on-page time is poor. Then, you note that you’re getting much more page engagement on shorter articles that get right to the point. Since this analysis tells you that your audience prefers shorter pieces, that’s the article length you should focus on from now on.

You can even edit some of those longer articles to bring them more in line with what you’ve learned about audience preferences.

You might also consider locking arms with content agencies to help you scale your efforts and learn more about where and how to focus your content strategy.

For instance, an email marketing agency may provide valuable insights into audience demographics, behavior, and preferences by evaluating email interaction data. This data can inform your content strategy, making sure that your content resonates with your audience and performs effectively on Google.

Additionally, the agency can help you employ Google Search Console Insights to better understand how your content performs and how to enhance it. You might also consider working with subject-matter expert writers and SEO strategists to elevate the value your content delivers.

What’s the search intent of your audience?

You can learn a lot about search intent by looking at the average time on the page coupled with the search terms used to find you.

Let’s say you’re targeting the term “diet plan” with articles on why crash diets don’t work. You’re getting some attention with these terms, but not much page time. This means the people finding your page are looking for something that you’re not offering.

By examining which external links bring these users to you, you can get a good idea of what they want. For example, if they’re coming to you from a website offering fitness plans, they’re likely looking for a page offering personalized diet plans.

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If you’re paying per click on Google Ads for this term, you may be wasting money on irrelevant interactions. You must add qualifying and negative keywords to reach the audience you need. This tactic will guarantee that most people finding you are doing so with the proper search intent.

Wrap up

Google Search Console Insights is a content marketing game changer. This free-to-use Google service evens the playing field by providing straightforward and actionable insights.

The bottom line? Take the time to understand how to read Google Search Console Insights and practice examining what the data is telling you. Use these insights to inform your content generation and marketing strategies going forward.

Here’s to your success!