Whilst doing a final check on Twitter before going to bed last night, I stumbled across an announcement from the Official Google Webmaster Central blog, letting the world know that they have expanded the data from the Top Search Queries section of Google Webmaster Tools and are now including more data and charts to make this more useful.
This is an area of Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) that has frustrated me and many other SEOs and webmasters alike for some time – in part for reporting very limited data, and in part because this data was often plainly wrong – there have been times that GWT has reported rankings for my clients and my own sites alike that we were nowhere to be seen for, no matter what methods I used to locate the claimed visibility in these areas.
Mark Edmondson got a speedy post up on this topic, announcing the death of ranking reports as we know them, and as this is expanded upon in the future by Google, he may well be right. However, right now, whilst this data is presenting infinitely more useful data, due to the current lack of choosing a keyword that you want to see a ranking for, I sadly think that this is still some way off, meaning that automated and manual rank checking alike isn’t likely to be going away imminently.
So, what exactly is this new data presenting to us? I didn’t want to use a clients site as an example for this, but I am happy to use some of one my own websites data to illustrate what is being shown here.
When you login to GWT there is a new look section of the dashboard:
So, instead of Google presenting you with an “average position”, you now get keyword queries that are offering the highest amount of impressions to your website and clickthrough data from the last 30 days. This data is useful, but as you click through it just gets better!
You now get a graph that shows the number of impressions that your site has had over the date range selected, as well as giving you data on how many click throughs you have had on these terms! But wait, we’re not finished yet – it gets even better!
You can also now expand the term that you want more data on, and it will give you the positions that the site has had in search results; the impressions, clickthroughs and clickthrough rates for that position. To my eternal shame, I’m not currently number 1 for my full name “Peter Handley”, due to a long established stationery business that is proving somewhat difficult to shift, but it’s interesting to see the clickthroughs that you get based on positions.
As well as this, you get to see which of the pages of the site have been generating the impressions and clickthroughs – I was quite intrigued to see that in the last month there have been 4 pages of my site that have ranked for name – I’ve only ever seen 2 of these appear
I have to admit that I have found this data more useful from more highly trafficked sites than my much neglected personal blog – but my early checks seem to indicate that this data is pretty close in terms of clickthrough data and correlating with numbers of visitors to the website.
You might be able to tell from the tone of this post that I am pretty excited at these developments. I can see the review of this data is quite likely to be time consuming, but I can see lots of ways to attempt to improve my campaigns using the data that this is now giving us!
Related posts:
