Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg.
And I'm Cherry Prommawin.
We are both Search Advocates at Google.
We are here
to talk about the most helpful Search Console reports
if you own or manage news websites.
Search Console offers a lot of reports that can help you understand
if your content can be properly crawled,
indexed,
and served on Google Search,
Discover,
and News.
In this video,
we'll focus on using the tools to analyze news sites' performance
and give some advice on how to use the data available
to succeed on Google.
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In the earlier SEO for News Sites video,
we talked about how you can manage your content
to appear on Google Search results and News Services.
In this video,
we will help you find out what is working,
what is not,
and how to make it better.
If you haven't watched the other video, you should.
The best way to analyze your search presence is through the...
[drumming]
Search Console Performance Reports.
In the
you will have access to three different reports:
Search,
Discover,
and
As you can see,
there is a difference between the data in each report.
Now, let's go through them one by one.
[whooshes]
The default Performance report view
shows data for the main Google Search results tab.
But you can also view the data for the News tab.
Click the
You can filter data
to see the results that appear in the main tab
in
and
Video,
for each of the respective tabs in Google Search.
I suppose the News tab will be very interesting to you.
There are many ways to look at your data.
Here are a few ideas to start.
If important pages on your site are not in the pages list,
it means you're not receiving traffic from Google Search
to those pages.
For example,
your primary News category pages should be findable,
as well as important articles from the last week or so.
If not, you should use the Inspect URL tool
to find out if the page is indexed,
or if not,
if it can be crawled and indexed properly.
Also, check if the pages can be found by site navigation,
or make sure that it's linked from other places on your website.
For example,
from the Home category or Hub pages.
Check how many queries show your site
when the user does or does not include your site name.
These might show interesting areas
where people are searching for content directly related to your site.
For example,
if you find out that the people searching for sports news
always attach your brand name to their queries,
it could be a sign
that this content brings a loyal audience to your site.
It could be an opportunity to reinforce your presence in that area.
If your content is read
in multiple regions and multiple languages,
you can create a country filter
for each of the main countries you target,
and analyze the queries and pages that are successful in those markets.
This could also help you prioritize content creation
and translation per region.
If the number of impressions of a particular query or page
is significantly higher than clicks,
or, in other words,
if the click-through rate, also known as CTR, is low,
it means your search snippets are not attracting clicks.
People see them and decide not to click through.
You might need to create better titles and descriptions
to make your snippets more attractive.
Compare queries and pages with low CTR
to those with high CTR,
to learn what works best for your audience.
The Google News report shows data from
and from the Google News app on Android and iOS.
This is different and doesn't cover data
from the News tab in Google Search results.
That is already covered in the Search Performance report,
as Daniel just showed.
If you would like more information
about the differences between Google Search and Google News,
please check the links in the description.
While the data provided in this report
is not the same as the previous one,
the types of analysis you will do here
are similar to the ones Daniel just walked us through.
You can look at missing and successful pages,
country preferences,
and devices used to search for your site.
The difference is that here,
you won't see queries in search appearances.
One interesting analysis is to export both reports' data
and try to compare what is working on Google Search
with what is working on Google News.
This can help you find ideas on what to invest on,
and how to format your content to succeed in each of them.
You can also visit the Devices tab.
You can then click
to create a filter for the report.
Try to find patterns on articles that succeed in each device.
This can inform you how to format your content,
based on what people read on a bigger screen,
as opposed to what they consume on the go.
[whooshes]
The Discover Performance report
shows similar fields from the ones discussed previously.
It shows a site's Discover traffic across all surfaces,
where users interact with it,
including traffic from Chrome and the following tab.
But the report is visible, only if your property
has reached the minimum number of impressions in Discover.
You can use this report to analyze
what types of content succeed on Discover.
Check if there are sections on your site
or different formats of content
that are consistently shown and clicked on Discover.
Compare those with Google News and Search
to find patterns that can be used across surfaces.
[whooshes]
One important thing to consider when analyzing your performance data
is the time range you are looking at.
As a news organization,
it's important for you to have a bird's eye view of your performance,
but also to know what's going on today.
In general,
looking at a longer period of time
should highlight your site's more evergreen long-term content
and the main news categories of your sites.
Looking at a shorter period
should show you more information
about bigger news stories currently being searched.
For the longer period analysis on Search Console,
expand the date range to include 16 months
using the
This will help you better analyze traffic fluctuations.
For example,
you might find out that your traffic is very seasonal
and has different patterns for weekdays and weekends
or for different months of the year.
This information can help you plan new content
based on the demand throughout the year.
For example,
you can focus on different groups of queries and content
for known regularly occurring events.
Google Trends can be very handy when trying to plan ahead too.
You can check your past spikes in traffic
for each of your website sections
and compare against observed days.
For example,
you might find out that every January you get a spike in traffic
for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
If you plan your content strategy in advance,
you'll be ready with interesting and relevant content
when demand comes.
For the shorter period analysis,
you should take advantage of the fresh data on Search Console.
When opening the
you have the option to choose
This will give you a partial data point,
which is updated a few times a day.
With this information,
you can get a glimpse of trending terms
that are just a few hours old.
For example,
if there is an ongoing story happening,
like an election or a championship,
you could follow the most recent data on Search Console
to make sure your site is appropriately visible.
[whooshes]
These are just a few ideas for you to get going.
Search Console provides a lot of functionality
that you can use to optimize your presence
in Google Search and Google News.
Check the Google News Initiative website
for more lessons and videos
specially created for news organizations.
Also, make sure to check Daniel's Search Console training series.
It's a great place to start,
if you want to do more with Search Console data.
Stay tuned!
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