Hi. I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search Advocate at Google,
and in this video, I'll share a very cool visualization
to analyze your Search Console data,
the bubble chart.
It can help you optimize
your site's Google Search Performance
by choosing the search queries you should be optimizing for
and the ones you might want to drop.
♪ [music] ♪
A bubble chart is a great visualization
when you want to compare multiple metrics and dimensions.
It enables you to see relationships and patterns
in your data more effectively.
In the example we'll discuss today,
you'll see Clicks,
Click-through rate,
and average position for queries and devices.
That's three metrics and two dimensions--
all at the same time.
If you'd like to follow along with the video,
you don't need to build the chart from scratch.
You can use a template we created
and connect it to your data.
Check out the step-by-step guide linked in the description.
[electronic chirp]
Let's go through the chart to understand what it shows.
Every bubble you see is a query.
The size of the bubble
represents how many clicks that query drove to the website.
The bigger the bubble,
the more traffic that query is generating.
The color of the bubble
represents the device used while searching.
That means that for every query,
you might see one bubble for a Desktop Search,
one for a Mobile Search,
and one for a Tablet Search.
The Y-axis represents the average position for queries.
In this case,
I used an inverted Y-axis,
which means that position number one is at the top.
The reason is that we're used to charts
where the higher the better,
so using an inverted axis makes sense here.
The X-axis represents Click-through rate,
which is the Click count divided by the Impression count,
and it's a proxy for how relevant the query is to the users
in the Search Results Page.
I'll not focus too much on this here
but I use the Log scale for both axes,
which is a better way to visualize data with a very large range.
In this case,
queries that are in the extremities of the chart
for CTR and Average Position.
And last,
the red lines show the average for each of the axes
to identify queries that are above or below the average.
This helps us divide the chart into quadrants.
I'll talk more about this in a minute.
Before discussing how to analyze the chart,
let me go through five customization options
you'll find in the template.
Use the Data control
to choose the Search Console property you'd like to analyze.
This makes it easy to go from one property
to another.
Use the Date range
to choose what period you'd like to see in the report.
Make sure you have at least a few weeks worth of data,
using only a few days might not be statistically significant.
Use the query filter
to include or exclude queries to focus on.
For example,
you might want to exclude your brand queries for this analysis.
You can also use Regular Expressions.
Use Country to include or exclude countries,
and use Device to include or exclude device categories.
[electronic chirp]
The goal of this visualization
is to help surface query optimization opportunities.
We're trying to divide queries into buckets
to make it simpler to prioritize
how much effort to invest in each of them.
As I mentioned,
the red reference lines
show the average for each of the axes.
Splitting the chart into quadrants,
showing four buckets of queries.
Your quadrants are likely to look different
than the one shared in this video.
They'll depend on how your site queries are distributed.
There are four types of queries in the chart.
First: Top position, high CTR.
There's not much you need to do for those,
you're doing a great job already.
Second: Low position, high CTR.
Those queries seem relevant to users,
they get a high CTR
even when ranking lower than the average query.
They could represent a significant contribution,
if their position goes up.
You should invest in optimizing them.
Third: Low position, low CTR.
When looking at queries with a low CTR,
this and the next bucket,
it's especially interesting to look at the bubble sizes
to learn which queries are still driving significant traffic.
While the queries in this quadrant
might seem unworthy of your effort,
they can be divided into two main groups.
If the query question is related to your site,
it's a good start to have it appearing in Search already.
Prioritize these queries over queries
that are not appearing in Search results at all,
as they'll be easier to optimize.
If the query is unrelated to your site,
maybe it's a good opportunity
to fine-tune your content to focus on other queries
that will bring relevant traffic.
Fourth: Top position, low CTR.
Those queries might have a low CTR for many reasons.
You should check the largest bubbles to find signs of the following:
Your competitors may have structured data markup
and are showing up with rich results,
which might attract users to click their results instead of yours.
Consider enabling more search features for your site.
You may have optimized or be accidentally ranking
for a query that users are not interested
in relation to your site.
Users may have already found the information they needed.
For example,
your company's opening hours, address, or phone number.
[electronic chirp]
Using the results from the example above,
you could download the queries you want to optimize for.
Check the landing page for those queries
and make sure to optimize for them
with the help of the Search Essentials
linked in the description.
Here are some tips.
Ensure that your title elements,
description meta tags,
and ALT attributes
are descriptive,
specific,
and accurate.
Use heading elements to emphasize important text
and help create a structure for your content,
making it easier for users and search engines
to navigate through your pages.
Add structured data markup
to describe your content to search engines,
and be eligible to display your content
in useful and eye-catching ways in Search results.
And think about related words that the user might search for
to find a piece of your content.
You can use the Keyword Planner provided by Google Ads
to help you discover new keyword variations
and see the approximate search volume for each keyword.
You can also use Google Trends
to find ideas from rising topics and queries
related to your website.
We'll talk more about this in the following episodes.
[electronic chirp]
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
For me, there's nothing like a good old bubble chart
to have some fun.
In the next episode,
we'll talk about the Search Console API
and show some examples to inspire the developers among us.
Stay tuned!
♪ [music] ♪
[bleep]
Yeah, of course.
Oh, no!
[bleep]