Share and Interpret your Search Console Data!

One of the most useful things I like to see in case studies are Google Search Console graphs. Organic traffic is more intentional than other forms of traffic, and so is more likely to convert, and less likely to quickly bounce from your site.

However, few case studies share search console graphs. If they show traffic numbers, they usually only show Google Analytics graphs. These are less useful, because they may reflect people spamming their links in social media outlets, and getting lots of not-very-useful traffic.

Seeing others' Search Console data is useful, because it helps temper expectations about what reasonable organic traffic growth should look like.

So, I'm going to share and interpret my Search Console graph, and I invite others to do the same!

Search Console Graph and Interpretation

Graph

https://imgur.com/UR7KBkn

Interpretation

• This is from months 2 and three weeks through month 3 of my site.
• The jump in impressions around 11/7 is mostly coming from one page hitting the first page of a high volume keyword.
• The dip in impressions starting 11/21 comes from Google moving my site off the first page for the high volume keyword. The page gets jerked around a lot in the rankings due to Google's experimentation, but now it's back on the first page. The page has a low click-through rate for this keyword, but still drives a large portion (25% or so) of my organic traffic.
• This whole time, I'm putting out around 1000 - 3000 words/week.
• This graph reflects about 8 weeks of data. In the first 4 weeks, I had about an average of 5 search hits/day. In the second half, I'm averaging about 15 hits/day.
• I've noticed that it takes about 3 - 4 weeks before I see a new article rank anywhere for its intended keywords.