Many clients I talk to are not using Google Search Console. This Google product was formerly known as “Webmaster Tools.” It was initially a place where you could verify ownership of a Website and find out any communication from Google if there were any technical issues or manual actions against your website. Now it’s actually the place where you can get detailed organic search referral information. This used to be found to a certain extent in Google Analytics.
It operates in a similar way to Analytics where you put a snippet of code in your website CMS or pages and then you’re granted access to this free product through your account. If you go into the section called search performance then you get a report that allows you to drill down into the past few months of data, or you can customize it and look at a particular day, week or month.
Here you get to see who searched for your website and what key phrases they put in how many times that your site showed up in the search results. The data available includes impressions (how many times your Website appeared in search results) and Clicks (how many times someone actually visited your Website) and tells you what position in the search results as well.
This is helpful from a couple of perspectives as it allows you to look at how your SEO is doing and where are you actually showing up in search and then what people are clicking so it’s a good metric to look and see not only how you’re performing with the SEO work you’ve done but it’s also very helpful to look at what opportunities you have. This indication of where you might be showing up, for example on the second page provides a great opportunity for you to focus on some legal marketing content related to those keywords and then move the needle from the second to the first page.
We always try to look for words that we believe have a highly value words and phrases where if somebody who is searching for that phrase and lands on your Website, how likely are they to be a new client for your law firm? We think in terms of Primary and Secondary phrases so then we try to put our energy into those terms to yield the greatest result while adding to the depth and of breadth of the optimization.
With a little research and brainstorming there’s an opportunity here to find an unlimited supply of potential keywords and opportunities. Which is really what SEO is all about.