Why you should start blogging ASAP.

If there’s any advice we’ve consistently given all our clients – it’s

you need to start blogging ASAP.

Before you finish your blog theme.

Before you agree upon a logo with your partner.

Before you prepare your hosting.

Before you order a content plan.

Sure, all that is important. You absolutely need a content plan and you need to know your customers, you need to be able to harvest their data and you need to have a vision for your blog. Your blog needs to look good.

However, there is one thing you need to start getting ASAP: Search Console data from Google.

You see, no matter how advanced your keyword research tools are, they all give second-hand data. The search volume numbers you get come from

• Google Keyword Planner
• Related searches
• Organic keywords competitors rank for
• Phrases and words from your competitors’ titles and website copy
• etc. etc.

But none of those sources give you first-hand, current, and accurate keyword data.

Google Search Console is a tool that serves to diagnose your site’s performance on Google. Apart from the mega-useful features like URL inspection and mobile usability, our main interest is the “Performance” section of it.

The Performance section shows what search phrases your website comes up for in Google’s search results pages (SERPs), what positions it has, and how many clicks it gets:

Now here comes the best part: once your content gets indexed by Google, the search engine will start showing it in SERPs.

Showing it among results for search phrases you’d NEVER expect.

That’s where we are coming to the main point of this post that can’t be stressed enough: start blogging ASAP, and get your content indexed by Google.

Here’s why Search Console Data is invaluable for content marketing:

 

1. You get the true search volume of keywords.

 

Here’s an example: a website ranks at #4-5 for the search phrase “product review examples”. During the past 28 days (set the range in Google search console report settings at the top) the website had 67 impressions for that search phrase:

We can conclude that the true monthly search volume for this keyword is about 70 searches per month.

 

2. You find new, lucrative keywords

 

Now let’s take it a step further and export Google Search Console data to a Google Sheet. Sort the data by “Positions”.

Take a look at the keywords that are on pages 3 of Google and deeper, yet still get over, say, 50 impressions:

These keywords are relatively high-traffic, and we can bet you’ve never seen them while researching your niche with a keyword tool!

Think of it – if your site is on Page 4 and gets 1251 impressions for a query – that’s a damn popular search query! You need to up your game and get to Page 1 for it, and most often that means dedicating a separate blog post to this query.

Check what URL of your site gets all those impressions and adjust your strategy accordingly. Sometimes just writing a new blog post dedicated to this search phrase is enough to get your domain to Page 1 and start raking in traffic! In other cases, just a bit of an SEO push will be enough to rank your existing content higher.

 

How do I get these data insights, too?

 

Start blogging as soon as possible.

Get at least some content out there and let Google index it and show it to searchers.

If you have no ideas – describe what your company or a service does, what kind of needs you solve, what kind of people you help, and why that is important. A simple post like that will get picked up by Google and start getting impressions for all the weird, unpredictable, high-traffic queries that will give you ideas for more blog posts!

Oh – and make sure you’ve installed Google Search Console on your site. Here’s how you do it.

Google Search Console data mining is one of the techniques we use while running content strategy audits for our clients. It takes a lot of experience (and patience!) to sift through impression data of a high-traffic site, but it’s always worth the work. We’ve boosted search traffic for over 200% for some of our customers. Get in touch with us and see if that service will work for your site!