“The general idea is we’ve moved from, ‘Do we rank?’ to, ‘Are we cited?’” said Zach Chahalis, Senior Director of SEO and Data Analytics at iPullRank. “The metrics that we need to care about, though, have changed.”

To begin understanding what we need to track in this new age of AI search, there are four questions marketers should be asking themselves:  

• Are we cited?
• Is traffic coming in? 
• What are visitors doing on our site?
• Are they converting?

The answers to these questions come from new metrics that you should be tracking so you can properly gauge your site’s success. 

The evolution from traditional search to AI-powered discovery is changing how we think about visibility, so it requires a completely new approach to measurement. This blog will look at some of the new metrics and how they can help your business. 

Where AI Factors Into Search

Before we jump right to the metrics, we need to do a quick recap on how AI search works. AI search is a change from deterministic rankings, where content is surfaced largely as-is based on predefined scoring signals, to probabilistic rankings driven by large language models that interpret, synthesize, and reason across multiple sources. 

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is the core pattern behind AI search and powered by hybrid retrieval (which is a combination of both lexical and semantic search, reranking documents using reciprocal rank fusion). 

Semantic understanding is driven by vector representations of meaning. Everything gets embedded in the same space, which means AI search indexing is inherently multimodal.

“You need to ensure that your content performs well in those modern retrieval systems by structuring it in a way that’s both machine-readable but also human-friendly,” Zach said.

Go too machine-readable, and people won’t stay on your site. It’s a balance you must meet (and iPullRank’s Relevance Doctor tool can help with this).

How to Optimize for AI Search

There are a few methods you can use to optimize your content for visibility in LLMs. These include:

• Structure your content into semantic chunks that are optimized for extractability. In other words, short, easily defined sections with clear headings and subheadings that answer specific questions directly. 
• Use entity-rich, embedding-friendly language with clearly defined entities, consistent terminology, and modifiers and descriptors (qualifiers like size, function, location, and purpose help differentiate similar entities).

• Monitor bot activity via log files to analyze how AI crawlers are viewing your website, and monitor for crawling issues and inefficient use of crawl and render budget.

• Understand query fan-out and how it can gather passages from multiple sources for a more complete answer.

“This takes the original search and then looks into dozens of related personalized and contextual variations, all behind the scenes, before that response even generates and comes back to you,” Zach said (and iPullRank’s Qforia tool can help identify fan-out queries).  

The New Metrics of Success

With the advent of AI search and its negative impact on website traffic, marketers need to rethink how they measure success and report it to executives. 

Here are the new metrics to consider:

Input Metrics

These are the signals that show whether your content and site are aligned with how AI and search engines understand and retrieve information. 

Think of these as your foundation:

• Passage Relevance – How well your content chunks perform in retrieval systems
• Entity Salience – How clearly defined and rich your entities are
• Bot Activity – What AI crawlers are actually doing on your site
• Synthetic Query Rankings – How you perform across query variations

Channel Metrics

You should be looking at all of these factors and using them to inform your content strategy. Uplevel your content to align with citation quality. If your brand has negative mentions, create content in response. 

At iPullRank, we call it “10x-ing content,” or creating content that’s 10 times better than what’s out there in order to be competitive. 

“If you are being seen in a negative way, there’s potential the AI platforms are less likely to talk about your brand,” Zach said. 

There’s a difference between citations and mentions, however. Tracking mentions is more complicated, but you should still try to track them wherever possible because the more your brand is talked about, the better you’ll perform in these channels. 

“Brand mentions are kind of the new currency of AI search between how good your content is and how much you’re answering questions that folks are looking for.”

- Zach Chahalis

You can try tracking Google Alerts to see if your brand is being talked about and how.

Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of DemandSphere, recommends a DIY method:

“Build up your own internal mapping of all the different properties that are relevant to your brand and treat those as candidates for potential mention tracking,” he said.  

Performance Metrics

These are the outcomes that prove whether visibility and citations translate into actual business impact:

• Traffic – Sessions coming from AI search and LLMs
• Events – Meaningful user actions on your site
• Conversions – The bottom-line results
• Engagement Depth – How users interact with your content

Be sure to measure your referral data. Ensure that you monitor sessions, conversions and revenue coming from AI search/LLMs in your analytics instance (by using GA4/Adobe/Amplitude/Etc.). Also, closely monitor your URL/Page-level data to identify additional insights and aid your optimization strategy.

Create a custom channel grouping as well. LLM traffic comes in as a referral channel in GA4, but GA4 is also well known for incorrectly classifying other sources of traffic. Consider creating a custom channel grouping to properly classify all sources, and then set a specific channel grouping for LLMs. 

Measure engagement metrics, which factor into traditional search extensively via NavBoost, which can impact AI search through RAG. Track everything from time on site to conversions. Simply put, provide a good experience for your users and you’ll get good results.

You should also understand how traffic becomes revenue. It is vital to understand data points such as average order value or the value of a lead for your business. This helps your business effectively develop a return on investment metric on your AI and organic traffic.

The Future of Metrics in AI Search

Many organizations are still measuring success using yesterday’s metrics. They’re tracking keyword rankings and SERP positions, while the future of metrics has moved to something entirely different.

This is why the three-tier metrics framework matters so much: understand and monitor your input metrics, channel metrics, and performance metrics. 

Start with the basics: get your log file analysis set up, create those custom channel groupings in GA4, begin scoring your passages for relevance and mapping your entities, track your citations, and understand the sentiment around your brand. Connect all of this to revenue so you can prove the value. 

Your existing content strategy, technical SEO foundation, and analytics infrastructure all still matter. You’re just adding new layers of measurement and optimization on top of what already works.

And if you need help, we’re right here to support you. 

“If you can’t answer those questions because you don’t have those data points, that’s where I highly recommend talking with an expert in the data analysis space,” Zach said. “Being able to know what that value is to you is vital.” 

And check out the other 2 articles in this series based on our webinars with Sitebulb:

• Technical Foundations and Setup for AI Search
• Content Strategy Tips for Visibility in the Age of AI Slop

The post Measuring AI-First Discovery: Visibility, Indexing and Tracking for GEO appeared first on iPullRank.

You know the situation.

We’ve all done it.

You try to line up traffic to landing pages from analytics with clicks from Google Search Console and the numbers are nowhere near close!

Then you mumble something about “not provided” and send an instant message to a friend about the good old days when you could see keywords in your analytics.

While it is a question of precision, it’s not a question of accuracy per se.

That data disparity is actually by design.

Let’s dig into the details and figure out why that is.

Google Search Console & Google Analytics Don’t Measure the Same Things

The short explanation is that the two data sources have different measurement methodologies.

GSC is built from query and click, or selection, logs, so the data will be somewhat similar to what you might expect from your own access log files (you know, the files you plead with DevOps to get access to for log file analysis).

Conversely, your analytics package collects data from the clickstream via JavaScript. That inherently introduces a lot of variables for how things can be measured as well as what those things are.

In order to better understand what causes the differences in data between GSC and analytics, you first need to understand how each tool collects and understands user behavior data.

The Anatomy of Query & Selection (Click) Logs

Google’s relentless quest for search quality naturally leads them to track a wealth of data points for every search, and every searcher, in hopes of gaining a complete understanding of what’s happening in the SERPs.

While they have indicated many times that they don’t allow clicks and click-through rates to influence rankings, despite evidence to the contrary, they have also said that they use click data for evaluation of performance.

This has been one of the ongoing arguments between public-facing Googlers and SEOs.

Personally, I believe Google’s side of it to be a semantic argument.

There are several evaluation measures that are standard to information retrieval such as:

• Clicks.
• SERP abandonment.
• Session success rate.
• Etc.

As you might imagine, Google has its own flavor of this called the Clicks, Attention and Satisfaction model (read Bill Slawski’s explanation if you need a translation).

It being discussed in a paper called “Incorporating Clicks, Attention and Satisfaction into a Search Engine Result Page Evaluation Model” combined with the click-based methodology highlighted in the Time-based Ranking patent suggests that someone at least took the time to think about how clicks might impact rankings.

According to Eric Schmidt’s testimony in 2011, Google did “13,111 precision evaluations.” That would be an average of ~35 per day.

So, it’s logical to assume that, if you’re always evaluating in a production environment, as the Search team is, then there is always potential for user clicks to impact rankings.

And then there’s this section from the Modifying search result ranking based on corpus search statistics patent that talks about search logs and how they might inform rankings in the future:

“The information stored in the session log(s) 2060 or in search logs can be used by the rank modifier engine 2070 in generating the one or more signals to the ranking engine 2030. In general, a wide range of information can be collected and used to modify or tune the signal from the user to make the signal, and the future search results provided, a better fit for the user’s needs. Thus, user selections of one or more corpora for issuing searches and user interactions with the search results presented to the users of the information retrieval system can be used to improve future rankings.”

What’s most interesting, however, is the concept that these logs feature a lot of noise in addition to their more valuable signals.

That suggests that taking the clicks completely at face value would be a mistake.

What type of noise are we talking about?

Well, for example, how many impressions are represented by ranking tools?

How many times do you hit enter on autosuggest and then realize that it triggers a search for “fan” instead of “fantastic 4?”

Or, what about when you’re scrolling on mobile and accidentally fat finger the wrong result?

These are all examples of how the data Google collects could feature a hefty amount of inaccuracies and they need to account for them.

Thanks for allowing me that aside.

OK, So What’s in the Log Files?

If the, now-defunct, Google Search Appliance documentation is any indication (which it may not be), query and click logs are simply text files that record data about users and their interactions with the SERP.

The documentation discusses search logs, which may or may not be the same as query and click logs as they are referred to in Google’s patents.

Despite being a simplified version of the system, it gives us some idea of what is tracked – features of the user, their query, and features of what they click on.

Digging deeper, in Google’s Systems and methods for generating statistics from search engine query logs patent, they talk a bit more about how a system that could power a tool such as Google Trends might operate.

For this discussion, I’m assuming that the underlying dataset is similar to, if not the same as, what powers Google Search Console and the Google Ads Keyword Planner.

They talk about the query logs as follows:

“A web search engine may receive millions of queries per day from users around the world. For each query, the search engine generates a query record in its query log. The query record may include one or more query terms, a timestamp indicating when the query is received by the search engine, an IP address identifying a unique device (e.g., a PC or a cell phone) from which the query terms are submitted, and an identifier associated with a user who submits the query terms (e.g., a user identifier in a web browser cookie).”

In other words, the search engine query logs are a bit more robust version of the GSA search logs.

The authors further explain in a bit more detail later in the patent with a discussion of how cookies, devices, user language, and location are tracked as well.

They also provide the following figure to give a visual representation of the data collected in the query log:

Giving more color to the system, the patent discusses this concept of a session record, which is a mechanism to determine if a given user has performed the same or similar searches within the given timespan.

This is especially important when it comes to measurement and reporting of impressions and/or search volume:

“A query session record includes queries closely spaced in time and/or queries that are related to the same user interest. In some embodiments, the query session extraction process is based on heuristics. For example, consecutive queries belong to the same session if they share some query terms or if they are submitted within a predefined time period (e.g., ten minutes) even though there is no common query term among them.”

The heuristics referenced in the above are perhaps the core of why Search Console and your analytics package will never match up.

Essentially, what the author is saying is that Google makes a decision in its query logging to determine if searches in your session are unique enough to be recorded as distinct.

Therefore, what you may believe to be two distinct visits to your site because they came from two different searches that landed on two different landing pages could potentially be considered one search and thereby one impression depending on how it is logged in Google’s query logs.

Click logs, on the other hand, feature more information on the behavior of the user once they have been presented with a series of results.

The Modifying search result ranking based on corpus search statistics patent reveals what can be stored in this dataset (emphasis mine):

“The recorded information, including result selection information, can be stored in session log(s) 2060. In some implementations, search data and result selection information are stored in search logs. In some implementations, the recorded information includes log entries that indicate, for each user selection, the query (Q), the document (D), the time (T) between two successive selections of search results, the language (L) employed by the user, and the country (C) where the user is likely located (e.g., based on the server used to access the IR system). In some implementations, other information is also recorded regarding user interactions with a presented ranking, including negative information, such as the fact that a document result was presented to a user, but was not clicked, position(s) of click(s) in the user interface, IR scores of clicked results, IR scores of all results shown before the clicked result, the titles and snippets shown to the user before the clicked result, the user’s cookie, cookie age, IP (Internet Protocol) address, user agent of the browser, etc. Still further information can be recorded, such as the search results returned for a query, where the search results are content items categorized into one or more corpora. In some implementations, similar information (e.g., IR scores, position, etc.) is recorded for an entire session, or multiple sessions of a user. In some implementations, the recording of similar information is not associated with user sessions. In some implementations, such information is recorded for every click that occurs both before and after a current click.”

While Google Search Console only surfaces a fraction of this information, it’s pretty clear how the Search Analytics tool is effectively a limited user interface built on top of this dataset.

What’s interesting here is the mention of activities that may happen across a SERP.

This is an indication that not only is every click tracked, but the features behind what generated the position of a result in a SERP.

What Determines a Click?

The public-facing documentation of Google Search Appliance does not indicate what is considered a click or an impression.

For instance, if I search for a keyword and click a result, hit back, and click the same result again, is Google considering that two distinct clicks or one?

The Systems & Methods for Generating Statistics from Search Engine Query Logs patent, however, gives some insight into the answer to that question.

The first thing to know is that they often sample the data. This makes a lot of sense in the Google Trends environment.

However, the author does note that there are use cases where they may not sample the data.

“To get reliable statistical information from the query log 108, it is not always necessary to survey all the query records (also herein called log records or transaction records) in the query log. As long as the statistical information is derived from a sufficient number of samples in the query log, the information is as reliable as information derived from all the log records. Moreover, it takes less time and computer resources to survey a sub- sampled query log. Therefore, a query log sampling process 110 can be employed to sub- sample the query log 108 and produce a sub-sampled query log 112. For example, the sub- sampled query log 112 may contain ten percent or twenty percent of the log records in the original query log 108. Note that the sampling process is optional. In some embodiments, the entire query log 108 is used to generate statistical information.“

Google also appears to deeply consider that two queries similar queries can represent one search.

This line of thinking is a core component that yields a difference in measurement between tools.

As Google has more recently moved to give the singular and plural versions of keywords the same search volume, much to the chagrin of the search community, it’s valuable to see an internal perspective on the matter.

I have presented their discussion from the patent in its entirety below (emphasis mine):

“For example, the user may first submit a query “French restaurant, Palo Alto, CA”, looking for information about French restaurants in Palo Alto, California. Subsequently, the same user may submit a new query “Italian restaurant, Palo Alto, CA”, looking for information about Italian restaurants in Palo Alto, California. These two queries are logically related since they both concern a search for restaurants in Palo Alto, California. This relationship may be demonstrated by the fact that the two queries are submitted closely in time or the two queries share some query terms (e.g., “restaurant” and “Palo Alto”).”

“[0035] In some embodiments, these related queries are grouped together into a query session to characterize a user’s search activities more accurately. A query session is comprised of a one or more queries from a single user, including either all queries submitted over a short period of time (e.g., ten minutes), or a sequence of queries having overlapping or shared query terms that may extend over a somewhat longer period of time (e.g., queries submitted by a single user over a period of up to two hours). Queries that concerning different topics or interests are assigned to different sessions, unless the queries are submitted in very close succession and are not otherwise assigned to a session that includes other similar queries. The same user looking for Palo Alto restaurants may submit a query “iPod Video” later for information about the new product made by Apple Computer. This new query is related to a different interest or topic that Palo Alto restaurants, and is therefore not grouped into the same session as the restaurant-related queries. Therefore the queries from a single user may be associated with multiple sessions. Two sessions associated with the same user will share the same cookie, but will have different session identifiers.”

Suffice to say the logging behind Google’s Search engine uses a specific series of methodologies to determine what a distinct search and distinct click are.

This may or may not align with what you believe or how your analytics platform is configured to believe a session is.

How Analytics Determines a Session

Analytics packages, on the other hand, also follow a series of methods for measurement of a user and their activity.

Depending on the analytics package, a “session” or a visit can be user-defined.

According to the Google Analytics documentation, “by default, a session lasts until there’s 30 minutes of inactivity, but you can adjust this limit so a session lasts from a few seconds to several hours.”

So, while we don’t know the exact timing of what Google Search considers a session, the numbers considered in the excerpts above are certainly less than 30 minutes.

In a patent related to Google Analytics, System and method for aggregating analytics data, the authors talk about how a user is tracked through a session ID and how that mechanism may become to be invalidated:

“A session ID is typically granted to a visitor on his first visit to a site. It is different from a user ID in that sessions are typically short-lived (they expire after a preset time of inactivity which may be minutes or hours) and may become invalid after a certain goal has been met (for example, once the buyer has finalized his order, he can not use the same session ID to add more items).”

As a result, a user can potentially be measured multiple times for the same visit.

Analytics packages are complex environments that allow for varying levels of specificity in their configuration.

There are numerous reasons why you won’t see consistency between two analytics packages let alone two tools that measure different things.

Why the Two Don’t Match Up

Simply put, a Google Search Console click is not a Google Analytics session and a Google Analytics session is not a Google Search Console click.

In the scenario above, wherein a user has clicked twice, that could be considered two clicks and one session.

Alternatively, if a user were to perform the two different searches and make two different clicks, their activity may be considered one impression and one click, but they could also invalidate their session ID or otherwise timeout at some point and be considered two distinct visits in analytics.

Or, consider this:

A user clicks on your result, but your analytics didn’t fire for any number of reasons. That speaks to any of the number of reasons why analytics isn’t always the most reliable source of truth.

Finally, GSC uses canonical URLs whereas analytics can use any URL for reporting a session. Google talks a bit about this in its documentation.

However, their discussion has more to do with explaining the differences within the context of the GSC to GA integration rather than explaining the differences in measurement methodologies

Why Is This a Problem?

The core problem is that many marketers don’t believe in GSC’s data because they consider analytics their primary source of truth.

Ignoring that all analytics is inherently flawed, I posit that parity between sources is unrealistic and we are looking at two sides of the same truth, just measured differently.

Performance data from Google Search Console is a measure of what’s happening on Google itself, not necessarily what is happening on your site.

Oh, and while we’re at it, don’t forget GSC’s position data is measuring something different than your rankings data.

How To Get More Precise Data

The precision of the data reported in Google Search Console actually increases as you introduce more specificity into how you review a website.

In other words, if you create profiles that reflect deeper levels of the directory structure, the tool yields more data.

It can be quite tedious to add 10s or hundreds of subdirectories to your Google Search Console, but the increase in data precision can prove to be quite helpful for use cases such as A/B testing and understanding breakout keyword opportunities.

When adding a wealth of profiles, the key limitation to keep in mind is that the GSC user interface limits you to 1,000 queries per search filter.

So, you should consider using the API to pull your data since it returns 5,000 per search filter.

Also, to extract as much data as possible, you should consider looping through a series of tries as search filters (S/O to William Sears).

This ensures that you’re using as many subsets of words as possible as filters to pull out as many results as possible.

Doing this by subdirectory and following your site’s taxonomy will allow you to get the most precise data possible.

Nothing Was the Same

Ever since the debut of “(not provided)” at the end of 2011, we knew our organic search data would erode.

Realistically, we will never live in a world where we can tie a visit directly to a session anymore.

The data that Google Search Console provides is the best that we will have moving forward.

While the data will not match up with your source of truth, that doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate.

The same way you shouldn’t expect Facebook Ads data to match up with Google Analytics or log files in Kibana to report the same as Adobe Analytics, you shouldn’t expect Google Search Console to match up with your analytics data.

Now, go out and be great.

The post Why Google Search Console & Google Analytics Data Never Matches appeared first on iPullRank.

So you have finally decided to take control of your website’s Organic traffic and begun looking into tools you can use for this task. Within a few articles you probably quickly realized that Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two of the most popular tools because they are readily available and free. 

Additionally, they are offered by the Search Engine that is likely driving around 90% of your Organic traffic and will thus be indicative of your overall Organic performance. 

While they provide somewhat different metrics, each one can give you a general understanding of how your content is performing and potential areas of improvement. 

Today, we will dive into how you can get started with Google Search Console and begin gaining valuable insights.

What Does Google Search Console Do?

If you wanted to explain to someone with no previous experience what Google Search Console can do, “technical analysis of your site and measurement of performance in Google search” would be a good way to put it. 

In fact, when trying to diagnose issues on a site, GSC should be one of the first places to look. In Google’s own words, the tool helps you “monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot” your site. What sets GSC apart from all the 3rd party tools is that it compiles all the analytics based on what Google sees. This is extremely important as no other tool can tell you about the index status of a page (more on this later).

Breaking down all the Google Search Console offerings by the sections of the tool, we can see where monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting happen:

While these are all the tools offered by Google Search Console, some will become your favorites instantly while others will require a lot of experience and knowledge to gain insights from. That being said, the tools you will want to use on a day-to-day basis to check your site’s Organic performance are also the easiest to understand.

But first, we will need to create a Google Search Console account to begin tracking.

How to Set Up Google Search Console (If you’ve Never Done it Before)

Before you begin this process, it’s important to note that it will work best with the support of someone on the technical team. If you have someone in IT or Development whom you can reach out to, this should be done by them (or at least with their supervision).
 

Though it’s not hard to go through these steps yourself, if you do not feel comfortable with it, it’s best to ask someone who is. If you are running your own business and are an army of one, or you are feeling daring, follow the steps below to begin tracking through Google Search Console.

Step 1: Add Property

Once you navigate to the Google Search Console page, you’ll need to add a property.

Click “add property” on the left-hand side:

Step 2: Choose the Property

If you have the know-how or support, choose the domain option. This will ensure that all the versions of the site are tracked (and even a lack of www or https wouldn’t be an issue). If you cannot access your domain name provider like GoDaddy, choose the URL prefix option. This will let you verify your site through multiple methods.

If you can’t get access to your domain name provider, use the URL Prefix option and enter your site’s homepage. 

This might look like a no-brainer, but beware of simple mistakes! Silly mistakes like typos or forgetting a slash or “www” can result in a useless account that will track a non-existent site. This might be useful to create in addition to the correct profile to monitor if the traffic is going to the right place, but as a sole property, it will be useless. 

To make sure you picked the right URL, go to your homepage and copy/paste the entire address bar. Notice that though the URL appears one way in your browser, it can actually have masked attributes. The URL below is actually https://ipullrank.com. A profile for the non-secure version of the site (http) would not be helpful much.

Step 3: Verify the Property

Regardless of the option you picked, you will then have to verify that you are the owner. For the domain level option, this will be done with your domain name provider. For the prefix choice, you will have options:

If your site is using one of the popular CMSs, like WordPress, there will usually be a section of the admin panel where you can copy/paste the code and be on your way.

Step 4: Confirm That it Worked

Don’t assume you’re out of the woods once you verify the site. Always confirm that everything is up and running before realizing you made a mistake a month later. 

GSC will not collect metrics retroactively so the sooner everything works, the sooner you can begin seeing how your site is performing. And consequently, the sooner you can go from a Google Search Console beginner to a seasoned pro.

Important Tools and Functionality in Google Search Console

Now that you have Google Search Console set up and understand what it’s capable of, we can get to the practical uses of the tool. 

Though we won’t go over every single item within the platform, we will cover all the basics that will give you the most important information about your site. This data will be enough to diagnose immediate problems, assess Organic performance, and review deeper metrics that can be indicative of technical issues to address. Below is the overview of the most valuable sections of GSC in chronological order.

1. URL Inspection Tool

To give a little historical background to this tool, back in the Google Webmaster Tools days (GSC’s former name), there were separate sections used for checking the indexation status of a URL (to see if the URL appears in Google searches), how the page would get rendered (what Google’s crawler sees after loading the page), and submission of a page to Google. 

Now, the URL Inspection tool gives a ton of useful information on the page in question. 

Simply click the left-hand side button and paste the exact URL into the field. Make sure the URL appears exactly as it does in the browser as slight variations will yield results for different pages. URLs with parameters will show different information than their clean/canonical versions (e.g. www.example.com?some_paramater_123 ≠ www.example.com).

The things to look for in the URL Inspection tool include:

• View of the crawled page: see what Google saw when they crawled the page
• Indexation requests: submit the URL if the page changed or if you want Google to crawl a new page as soon as possible
• Index status: check if the page is indexed (or why it isn’t)
• Mobile usability: is the page mobile-friendly?
• Live URL testing: see what Google may see and which parts of the page may not be loading

2. Search Results Dashboard

The Search Results section is one of the best sources of Organic traffic data for any site. Use this tool to see clicks (how many times people actually clicked on your site in search results) and impressions (how many times people saw your site as an organic result in Google but didn’t necessarily click it). Take advantage of the filter that allows you to isolate pages, keywords, dates, compare two different time ranges, and much more.

You can also export this data into Excel to analyze it in any way you wish there. However, if you’re not ready for a deep analysis, using Search Results to see trends in clicks, impressions, and click-through rate (percent of people who saw a result that clicked on it) can give you an idea of whether the site is growing organically.

Coverage

To see the site’s overall indexation performance, check the Coverage report. 

Here you’ll see how many pages are deemed valid to be included in search results and how many are excluded due to errors or other factors. 

The most important thing to monitor in this section is the errors. A high percentage of pages with errors is usually a good sign that you need to look into what’s causing them. 

Likewise, if most of your site is excluded from Organic results, it is worth investigating why. A seemingly benign update on the site could have de-indexed your pages and you will be able to see something like here (but hopefully you already monitor your traffic in Search Results and noticed something was broken right away).

Sitemaps

If you are familiar with XML sitemaps, you already know how beneficial they are for SEO. This .xml file hosted on your site lists the pages you want Google to crawl, index, and hopefully rank in their search results. Similar to the indexation requests mentioned earlier, you can submit a sitemap directly to Google via GSC.

After submission, you can see the status of the sitemap and the URLs it contains. This is an excellent way to ensure Google is crawling your XML sitemaps and seeing all the URLs within.
 

Any errors will be shown in the tool, but do not use this section to test a sitemap. Ensure that all the pages in the sitemap are indexable before submitting or you will risk having your sitemaps only partially crawled (an especially large sitemap with errors would be a waste of resources to review, so do it yourself before submitting for Google’s review).

Mobile Usability

Similar to coverage errors, mobile errors are important to monitor. With Google actively trying to force the entirety of the internet to be mobile-first, they are prioritizing the mobile experience over the desktop experience. 

In layman’s terms, if your site has mobile issues, you will not outperform competitors who have mobile-friendly sites. As such, make sure these errors are as close to 0 at all times.

Security and Manual Actions

If you’ve heard of the infamous J.C. Penney story, you might already know why it’s important to monitor the Manual Actions section of GSC. 

A site caught buying links or using other “blackhat SEO” tactics is often subjected to a manual penalty. This means that an actual person took a look at what you are doing and decided you were trying to manipulate the Organic rankings by tricking Google. If you know of anything like this being done by your site, you must check this section regularly and anticipate the worst. 

But even if your SEO practices are sparkling clean, there can be instances of competitors using tactics to tank your site’s performance. And though many claim the idea of negative SEO is wrong, there can still be a manual action against your site despite your work adhering to standards.

If you received a manual action message in GSC, it is worth investigating and trying to correct the issue. 

If you did in fact try to game the system (or someone you hired has), it might be time to change your ways and clean up your act. While no guarantee of forgiveness is made, a reconsideration report submission by you can get the penalty lifted and get your site’s performance to come back.

Similarly, the Security Issues section can show a major problem that needs to be addressed immediately. Here, a major security breach might be surfaced to you. This is an immediate priority as a true breach can lead to stolen information (at times credit card data) from your customers. 

If not fixed quickly, this can result in a disaster so monitor this section of GSC regularly and make sure notifications from the platform go to your inbox and not into the spam folder.

Tricks and Tips

Now that we covered the core basics, you should have a pretty good understanding of what to look for in the Google Search Console platform and begin making your way from a total beginner to a seasoned professional. 

A strong focus on diagnosing errors as they arise and fixing them right away can save you and your team many headaches down the road. Likewise, monitoring the performance of your traffic can show you seasonal changes, repeating trends, and growth/drop of Organic traffic. However, there are countless neat tricks you will discover as you use the tool more and more. Here are a few:

1. Compare Date Ranges (Especially Year Over Year)

When you’re looking at the site performance in the Search Results section, you will have the option to filter by date. Within that filter, you can compare different date ranges. 

This is extremely useful for seeing how you are pacing. You can begin comparing month-over-month data after two months and year-over-year data after a year. Year-over-year data is especially telling as it will compare the same seasonal trends rather than two consecutive months.

2. Filter Out Branded Traffic

If you are still new to SEO, you may not know the axiom of branded traffic being a given. As such, it’s always best to separate brand and non-brand traffic in any report. 

Terms including your brand will often rank close to position one (unless your brand name is ubiquitous and too generic). Use the query filter in the Search Results section to isolate the terms “not containing” your brand. These terms offer better insight into where you succeed and where you stand to improve.

3. Remove Pages From Search You Accidentally Pushed Live

Accidents happen, and if someone on your team posted something that wasn’t quite ready to be seen by the world, there is an undo button in GSC. 

Simply remove the URL to make sure no one finds it in Google search. But make sure to fix the issue by changing the page or removing it as this is a temporary solution.

4. Use the Links Report

If you don’t have a great tool like Ahrefs to check your backlinks, Google Search Console can offer something similar in its Links report. While limited in some ways, you can still uncover who links to you and which pages are the most popular resources to cite across the web (according to Google).

5. Don’t Get Attached

If you’ve used Google Search Console long enough, you would know how much the tool has changed over the years. Some changes were for the better, but many were removals of sections of GSC that were deemed not useful. 

Of course, this was subjective and many of the beloved features to be removed are still sorely missed today. While some bits remain in the Legacy Tools section of GSC, many will never come back. Because of that fact, it is ill-advised to heavily rely on any specific part of GSC as your sole source of information. 

Be prepared to lose data at any point and always keep your ear to the ground by following SEO news. You may have a warning period before losing your favorite feature when you can download as much data as possible before it’s gone.

Conclusion

Congratulations! If you’ve followed all the steps and poked around the platform, you are no longer a total novice in Google Search Console. But you will need to continuously hone your skills by viewing the reports and analyzing the data in them. 

This will take practice but will yield amazing results almost immediately since the tool was built for that very purpose. And when you master everything in this article, you can begin learning about more advanced things like Core Web Vitals and the report offered in GSC as well as things like the Crawl Stats Report in the Legacy Tools section.

If you want to continue learning more about SEO and reporting, head over to iPullRank’s Blog where you can find in-depth resources explaining the most exciting new marketing concepts.

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Google Search Console (GSC) appeared first on iPullRank.

VLOOKUP refers to the vertical lookup of values in Excel. This function is most useful to reference a value in the corresponding rows of a column. When you have an extensive series of data such as countless rows of user ids and you need to find values associated with them, VLOOKUP is your friend. This function is one of the most used and can simplify wrangling data.

What does VLOOKUP do?

VLOOKUP is a built-in function on Excel (or Google Sheets) designed to work with data that has been organized into columns. Provided a specified value, VLOOKUP essentially “looks up” a value from one column and responds with the corresponding value from another column. This function simplifies the referencing of data and honestly makes my life easier as a Data Analyst.

VLOOKUP will “look up” one value in the column of a table and return its corresponding value from another column where the lookup value is matched.

The syntax is:

=VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])

• Lookup_value is the value you want to look up and that will be used to match data. This is usually an identifier (an ID of some kind). The value must exist in the worksheet you reference.

• Table_array is the table from which you want to retrieve data.
  • Remember that the lookup value should always be the first column of the range you are looking for your value in. For example, if your lookup value is found in cell B4 of your worksheet, your table array/ range should begin with column letter B.

• Col_index_num is the number of the column from the left side of
  the table_array from which you want to retrieve data.
  • If your range is B2:G24, your first column would be B and C would be your second column. If you are looking for data in column E, your column index number would be “4”.

• Range_lookup defines whether or not the lookup_value is an approximate match or an exact match of the value you are comparing it to in the left-most column of the table_array.
  • TRUE: Approximate match is needed. 
  • FALSE: An exact match is required.
  • Instead of typing out “true” or “false”, I personally prefer using “1” for a true/approximate match or “0” for a false/exact match.

NOTE: * True is selected by default. This option is only useful for numeric tables, sorted in ascending order.

In other words, 

=VLOOKUP(lookup value, range containing the lookup value, the column number in the range containing the value you’re looking for, approximate match (TRUE / 1) or Exact match (FALSE / 0)).

How do I reference data from another worksheet or workbook?

Many times, the data you are looking to reference lives elsewhere and might be buried among other data points. To find your value, simply reference its location in the formula.

The only difference in referencing data on a separate sheet is that the exact name of the sheet followed by “!” must be included in the function as demonstrated above.

=vlookup(A2, Prices!A2:B6, 2, 0) 

To reference data in a different workbook, you must also follow certain rules of the function.

=vlookup(A2, [ProductDATA.xlsx]DATA!$A$2:$F$6,2,0)

[ExactWorkbookName.xlsx]WorksheetName! 

NOTE: *The reference used in the above argument is an absolute reference, meaning that the column and row references are prefixed with dollar signs ($). This ensures that your range doesn’t shift when you copy your formula to other cells. You can manually place these before the cell letter to lock the column and after the cell letter to lock the row. You can also press F4 to lock the cell values in your function.

When should VLOOKUP be used?

Keep in mind that VLOOKUP can only be used to reference data on the leftmost column of your range. Therefore, VLOOKUP can only pull data to the right of the reference column. This shouldn’t be too much of a limitation, as most columns will already be to the right.

VLOOKUP is also a vertical-based function and will reference data fixed into columns and look from top to bottom. Another key point to note is that VLOOKUP can only look up values based on a single criteria. For example, if you are looking to reference the first and last names of a customer or employee, but their names are separated into different columns, you must first concatenate first and last names into a single column that can then be referenced by VLOOKUP. 

When working with what might seem like endless rows and columns and you need to perform quick matches of data that is not left-based, INDEX-MATCH is generally preferred. The INDEX function will return the value from a specific position in an array and MATCH will return the position of the value you are looking for. Together, they are flexible and extremely useful for extracting data from tables or ranges. All-in-all, INDEX-MATCH is not left-based and allows you to be more flexible with referencing values.

What are the limitations of VLOOKUP?

VLOOKUP is great for “looking up” data, but it does have two significant limitations: 

1. It’s unidirectional, meaning it must work with indexes fixed to the left side of the work area and will return an error or will be unable to reference the appropriate values.
2. Because VLOOKUP references a col_index, it’s unable to dynamically update whenever you insert new columns to the table_array.
   • To increase your flexibility with the VLOOKUP function, you can name your ranges.

What is the difference between VLOOKUP and LOOKUP?

The main difference between VLOOKUP and LOOKUP is that VLOOKUP will take the leftmost column and find corresponding values in the column you specify. LOOKUP, on the other hand, will look at adjacent rows and columns to find your value, similar to the functions of VLOOKUP for vertical lookups and HLOOKUP for horizontal lookups. LOOKUP can be considered the old-school function to look up values in Excel and does have limitations. When using it, your data must be sorted in ascending order or it will automatically return the closest match if it doesn’t find the value you are referencing. For this reason, both VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP will best suit you when looking for exact matches.

While being one of Excel’s simpler functions, VLOOKUP is one everyone who works with spreadsheets should know. Excel has a multitude of functions that make working with large datasets more manageable. What are some other functions that you’ve found useful working within Excel or Google Sheets?

Let us know in the comments below. Be sure to check out our Blog for more resources and sign up for our newsletter.

The post Excel Basics: How to Use VLOOKUP appeared first on iPullRank.

On his personal Twitter account, our Founder and Managing Director, Mike King, highlighted how much content our entire team has worked to publish since we went on mandatory work from home on March 11.

We've been putting out a lot of content, so I want to catch you up in case you've missed something.

Before I start, we have a webinar on the Marketing in the Age of COVID-19 next Wednesday at 1pm. Please RSVP https://t.co/kDwMgK0hH0

And away we go! pic.twitter.com/MgXfhVoZSa

— Mic King (@iPullRank) April 17, 2020

The Tip of the Marketing Iceberg

A lot of our content recently has focused on the importance of marketing now that everyone’s normal routines have been turned upside down. 

The vast majority of our content during this time has been dedicated to creating resources to help businesses with their marketing and SEO efforts, which can be found in our COVID-19 Resource Center. 

All of our recent work has led up to our Marketing in the Age of COVID webinar and the corresponding ebook the entire team put together. While we are PROUD of the efforts the entire iPullRank team has put into this, we are even more so in the results that have come from it.

Below the Water: Our Marketing Results

One of the most eye-opening facts I’ve read many times is that 90% of an iceberg is below the water. Our content creation and increased output since the pandemic turned our lives upside down is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s below the surface is the success we have started to see. 

While we ramped up our internal marketing at the start of the year, we saw one of the most impressive spikes in marketing qualified leads in early April.

Our sales-qualified leads have followed a similar trend as well, though not as dramatic.

These increases speak not just to the quality of our content, but also to the timeliness of it. These are topics and information that SEO Managers, Directors, and even CMOs are looking into. Going back to the Guides we published in April shows how engaging and informative these topics truly are. 

Our 50 Techniques for Keeping Ahead of SEO in the New World guide currently has a conversion rate of 29% while our Forecasting and Predicting ROI for SEO has a conversion rate of 35%. These are not skewed because of low numbers either, each of these guides has seen thousands of visitors and hundreds of downloads in just a few short weeks. 

Our Marketing in the Age of COVID webinar was also a success with a healthy 32% signup rate and more than 46% of registered attendees showing up. Additionally, we saw more than 12% of signups watch the replay within a week of the live event. 

Our Rankable Live sessions saw similar results, with the first event having a 70% attendance rate(!) and a 48% signup rate and the second pacing a solid 48% attendance rate and 43% signup rate. 

By connecting with consumers in an empathetic way, we have seen our increased marketing output provide solid results quickly. 

Our Content Promotion Efforts

Of course, content creation is just one piece of the marketing puzzle. The second aspect is just as important, promoting our content across various channels. 

At the peak of our content output, our marketing team was tasked with at least 2 hours of content promotion each day. We have already started to see an increase in traffic from channels we have not focused on in the past. 

Last summer, we created the @iPullRankAgency Twitter account and slowly started to gain followers. However, at the start of 2020, before COVID-19 was a great concern in New York City, we began to ramp up our activity. February and March saw a dramatic rise in sessions from Twitter because of it. 

While April has seen less traffic come from Twitter than the past two months, our agency Twitter has seen increased activity during this time. 

There’s still work to be done on this channel, but it is encouraging to see increases like these in our Twitter analytics. In addition to Tweeting regularly and engaging with other accounts more frequently, we have started to participate in #SEMrushChat and other Twitter chats. 

In fact, April 2020 was the best month for new followers and Tweet impressions for iPullRank, and it wasn’t even close. 

Mike King has also worked to promote iPullRank through guest posting opportunities, like his SearchEngineJournal, Advanced Web Ranking, and Medium posts, as well as joining webinars and podcasts frequently. 

Planning for the Future

One thing that the COVID-19 pandemic showed everyone was that planning is essential, but also must be flexible. The ability to pivot our content strategy helped us stand out and build our audience, but some brands weren’t prepared for this type of flexibility and were forced to run mistimed ads.

GEICO’s “Perfect High-Five” commercial is a perfect example of this, and was pulled quickly due to social distancing efforts that made their ad tone deaf. 

There are two important takeaways from what the entire iPullRank team has been able to do during this challenging time. First, even when apart and working from our respective homes, we are still one of the most innovative and cohesive teams I have ever worked with. 

Second, our ability to quickly, and seamlessly, shift the direction of our marketing efforts paid off almost immediately. This extends beyond just our company, but also to our existing clients as well. 

Above, you can see how one of our clients, a major lender, was able to position themselves as one of the most trusted companies. These efforts now will surely stick around once life returns to normal and users will remember them as a source that helped out when many others could not. 

Below you can see how another financial services company in a different vertical saw an increase in clicks, impressions, and click-through rate as a result of shifting their content strategy as well. 

These spikes were a result of not only the increased demand but also from their flexibility to adjust their strategies at a time when others were staying true to their pre-COVID-19 plans. 

We can Help You do the Same

Nearly every industry is facing hardship right now. Unemployment is rising by the week and the stock market erased ten years of gains in less than a month. This is not the time for knee-jerk reactions, but for companies to make bold yet calculated decisions. 

Some actions we recommend everyone should look into now are:

Content Audits

With so many businesses having published new information around COVID-19 best practices and initiatives they’ve started because of the pandemic, it is important to check and make sure old content is not conflicting with these new pieces. 

By taking action here, you can ensure your messaging is consistent by reviewing old content that may contradict new messaging that has been added as a result of COVID-19. If past content does not match your current tone, temporarily deindexing them can prevent Organic users from stumbling upon it in Search.  

Audience Reports and Updated Personas: 

Consumer behavior has changed drastically in a short period of time, and some of these changes will likely be permanent even after the pandemic lifts. No one’s personas are accurate right now and audiences need to be looked into again as a result of these changes. 

Look into what has changed in your audience’s behavior and take the proper steps in content creation and promotion to ensure you are still reaching your consumers with empathy. How their behaviors have changed during this time will have a great impact on where they are looking for content, and how they are looking for it and will show how you need to adjust your strategies to meet their needs

Paid Campaigns 

As a result of brands slicing Paid advertising budgets, the cost of Paid Search and Paid Social Ads have decreased considerably. By investing in these now while the price is lower than usual, you can increase your brand’s presence and reach for a fraction of the price.

Think about what content will portray your brand in the best possible light in the current and leverage this in Paid campaigns. 

With low costs for Paid Search and Paid Social right now, this is the perfect time to run campaigns to try and grow your target audience. Think, what consumers may be interested in what you offer now that wouldn’t have been at the start of the year? 

Your Next Steps

Our internal efforts have yielded success and our flexibility has helped our clients. What you need to pay close attention to right now are: 

• The potential ROI of increased Paid Search and Paid Social budgets
• Auditing Content to maintain consistent messaging
• Update Audience Personas to match changing consumer behaviors
• Continue creating quality content that is time sensitive for the ongoing pandemic and likely recession
• Remain active on Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram

If you’re concerned because your company has not seen the same increases, this is not the time to worry but to take action and we’re here to help you every step of the way. 

Contact us today and we can help you right the ship and prepare for growth in the end and be sure to check out our blog to get more ideas on how to improve your marketing strategies. 

The post How to Ramp Up Your Marketing During the Pandemic appeared first on iPullRank.