301: Less Work, More Traffic - A Free Workshop (+ 7 Ways to Strategically Use Google Search Console!)

Hey folks, Bjork here. I'm doing a quick solo episode today. It's actually an episode focused on Google Search Console and I'm excited about this because it actually ties into an event that we're doing here coming up. And the event is all about how to optimize your content. We're calling it Less Work, More Traffic. And the idea is how do you think strategically about your library of content and do less work to get more traffic? Now, it doesn't mean no work, you're going to have to actually do work. But it's all about thinking, not just about creating new content, but how do we take the old content we have and optimize it? And there's lots of ways that you can do that. We're going to be talking about some really specific things that we do and some easy to follow processes that you can use that help you to discover the best area for you to focus on and then what you can actually do once you want to, once you've pinpointed the content that you want to update. So if you're interested in checking out that event, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com register. It's going to be happening on the 27th of April at 12 Central. You can do the time zone calculation there if you want. And we're going to have a replay available as well. But you can just sign up if you're interested, even remotely interested in checking that out. It's FoodBloggerPro.com Register to learn more about that. We're going to go through that specific process, but today I'm going to talk about seven different things that you can do within Google Search Console. And a lot of people think about Google Analytics. We spend a lot of time in Google Analytics, but we don't spend as much time in what I'm going to call GSC for short. So I don't have to say that over and over again because it's, it's kind of a little bit neglected in the world of Google Tools, but it's really powerful and actually offers some incredible insights. So I'm going to talk about some ways that you can use it. And then in that event that we're doing next week, if you're listening to this podcast in real time, in that event we're going to walk through a specific process, start to finish, what it looks like to pinpoint content that you can optimize specifically around search optimization, how you can find those high value pieces of content, where they're, they're not fully optimized. And then some of the things that you can actually do to go about optimizing that. So be sure to check that out again. Food blogger, foodbloggerpro.com register but for those who aren't familiar, here's a couple ways that you can use. Last time I'll say it Google Search Console, or last week, two to three times I'll say it. No promises that I won't say that again. But for the most part, from now on, I'm going to say gsc. So let's jump in and talk about it. Number one, site maps. So for those who aren't familiar, a site map is essentially a map of your site, right? It's the word is describing what it is. And Google crawls your site. We talk about that all the time. There's bots that come and they crawl your site, and those bots are crawling your site to inform a search engine. Or maybe it's a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. They have bots as well. Clarity actually has a bot, a tool that we're working on that crawls your site once you start using it. All of these are tools that come in and crawl your site to get information about your site and to bring that back and display it in a certain way. For Google, it's displaying it as a search result, and that'll just happen naturally. So if you have links on the web that eventually point back to your site, then Google will probably find its way to your site. But it's better if you have a site map that you just give to Google and say, here are all the different pages on my site and here's how I want you to treat them. And the best way to do that if you are running on WordPress is to use a plugin called Yoast SEO. And what Yoast SEO does is it creates a sitemap automatically. And then you can take that URL, you'll be able to see it in the plugin and put that into gsc. That will then look at the site. Google will then look at your site and say, okay, I can see all of the different pages. I can see if I should crawl these or not. And then I can take that into consideration when the googlebot crawls your site. Now, an important consideration here, if you are starting to do video, is that you should consider looking at a plugin called yoast SEO. I think it's called yoast SEO for video. Yo video SEO for WordPress. And this is a premium plugin but what this does is it layers on additional information about video. And a lot of people don't know this. If you're using the regular site map plugin and you're also doing video, you're not fully optimizing your sitemaps. You also need that video SEO plugin. And what that will do is that will give additional information to Google via your sitemap about your videos. Now, another consideration on top of that, if you are also using an ad Network, we use AdThrive, for instance, that video SEO plugin for Yoast isn't going to be smart enough to also catch those videos that you're doing with your ad network. At least it's not at the time that we're recording this. So then you have to also use a sitemap for your ad network. So we actually have two different video sitemaps, one for Ad Thrive, that represent the 90 or so videos that we have that are running video ad players. And then we also have a sitemap for any of the YouTube videos that we have. That's a video sitemap and that lives within the Yoast SEO sitemap. But what that does is that gives additional information to Google about the videos on our site. So all of those are submitted. You can have more than one submitted sitemap. We actually have three. An AdThrive video sitemap. We have a category sitemap, and then we have the sitemap index, which is kind of the hub for our sitemaps. And technically, you actually within your regular sitemap, that should account for the category sitemap. So usually what you'll see is you'll just have one, and then within that one, you'll have multiple sub sitemaps. So when we look at our sitemap index, we have within that category, page, post, video, and Web story sitemap. So anyways, point being, you can have multiple sitemaps, and you want to make sure that you have a different video sitemap for any of the video content that you have. It's something that people normally don't think about. We just started doing that a couple years ago. That's the first one. Sitemaps within gsc. Second URL inspection. This is a great tool to do any type of troubleshooting. So let's say you've noticed something that's a little bit weird within your site and you want to do a little bit of troubleshooting to see if there's some issue with one of the reasons why maybe your site isn't displaying like you want it to in Google or you would just want to see other ways that you can optimize this site. You can use the URL inspection tool and essentially that's a little health check from Google on a specific URL on your site. And it will show you all of the different considerations. It'll say, hey, is this submitted to Google? Has it been indexed? But it will also show you any areas for improvement. And it's kind of like a stoplight where it's green, yellow, red and green means it's great, it's valid, it's working. Yellow's like, hey, slow down here, there's a warning. You should look at this. Sometimes it means you need to add additional information, sometimes it doesn't. It's just kind of a yellow flag for you to take a look. And then there's red, which is an error. And it says, you know, this essentially is something that you should look at and you should try to fix as soon as possible. Kind of that. Stop, stop what you're doing, take a look at this. This is an issue that we consider to be really important. And by we I mean Google. So it's a great tool for troubleshooting, but it's also a great tool if you make updates to a specific post, you can come back and you can, you can look at that and you can take a look at what Google is saying about that by doing a little health check on that. Now when you do that health check, one of the things that you can do is you can request that Google indexes that page again. So that, that means that Google's gonna take a look at that, it's gonna come back to that page and it will update the information that it has on it. That's really important. If you've made updates or changes that you go ahead and do that with the URL inspection tool so you can see the most up to date information. So number one sitemaps, number two URL inspection, number three, discover what is discover. The best way to understand discover is to download the Google App. So just download the, it's, it's, it's like the app that you use for searching Google, it's in the App Store or Android and essentially it's like the Google feed. So when you are pulling up that app and you're scrolling through, it's going to give you the information that Google thinks is that you're interested in seeing. So for me, I've been kind of interested in cryptocurrency. And I have like a dodge coin dogecoin. I don't even know how to say it. Coinbase information. There's actually a page how to ask Google to recrawl or update a page, which is funny because that's what we're talking about right now. And then there's stories there. And essentially what Discover is is a feed of information that Google considers to be interesting for you. They surface that based on your browsing history and things that you've read about, things that you've looked at, maybe YouTube videos you've watched, all of that information. Google's able to pull in from the Google products that you visited. So it knows that information about you and it can surface content. And for us as content creators, what we want to do is have our content surfaced in as many places as possible. One of the ways that we've been talking about Discover a lot is with web stories. Web stories have been kind of quiet in quarter one. It was interesting to kind of watch Google testing that in quarter four. We're going to start getting into testing it a little bit more with a pinch of yum here in the next month or two to see. Is this something that's worth us moving forward on, spending time with? We've been talking about that on the Food Blogger Pro forums a little bit, saying like, hey, what, what does this look like for us to do stories and to do that? Well, and in order to do that, we need to have information around how much that content is getting, how much exposure that content is getting. And the Discover area in GSC is going to show us that. It's going to show us not only the number of impressions that something is getting, but also the number of clicks so we can see the type of traffic that we're getting from the content that is showing up in Discover. Now, it could just be a normal web page, right? So could be a recipe that you're posting and that displays in somebody's Discover feed, and people click on it and interact with it and come to your site. But it also could be a web story where somebody clicks into it and they watch that web story within Discover and they kind of click through that and interact with the web story. So Discover is the place where you can figure that out and see that information. Now, one of the things that we're also doing is we're thinking about how can we use Google Analytics to get a better understanding of web story traffic. This is just a little tip that I wanted to share. One thing that we're doing is we're actually creating a different Google Analytics property. So you have a property within Google Analytics. It's not technically a different account. So if you look at your Google Analytics accounts, there's different tiers. And if I'm looking at the Pinch of Yum account, we have a tier that is pinch of Yum. It's. It's Pinch of Yum. It's kind of like the hub, right? So the analytics account and then the property, it's called properties and Apps is where you can kind of divide that up into other areas. So one of the properties we have is videos.pinchofyum.com, which is for anybody who's purchased a Pinch of Yum ebook. There's some videos that come along with that. We have pinchofyum.com, which is like the main hub for all pinch of Yum traffic. And then we also now, in addition to some other ones, we have pinchofyum.com webstories. And essentially what that is, it's. It's a different property to track any of the quote unquote traffic or metrics, I guess is a better word for web stories, related content. And the reason that's important is because we don't want our web stories to be interfering with our real quote unquote real traffic to our website. So we've created different properties to track that. That's in Google Analyt, and I was talking about Google Search Console. But GSC splits that out, right? So it doesn't muddy the water because there's an actual discover area. So if you haven't spent time in there, it's an interesting area to pull up, especially if you're starting to do web stories. Because the primary way that we're seeing Google use those or the primary way we have seen them use web stories is within that feed with within Discover. So be sure to check that out. You might not have any traffic there that's normal. You might not have any CL clicks or impressions. But if you start to do web stories or if some content occasionally gets picked up, you'll probably see some spikes. It's not as consistent as search traffic. It's really kind of spiky behavior. It's almost like something goes viral for a few days and then it dies off. But it's an interesting area and something to keep an eye on. That's number three. Discover number four. This is more of kind of a PSA of sorts. Make sure that you actually have email notifications turned on. I've heard stories of people who have opted out of GSC notifications. And there's some really important emails that they send out, and people aren't notified of those because they've opted out of receiving those emails. So you can do that by going to the top, right? There's a little profile icon with a settings widget. It's called User settings. You click on that and then it says email preferences. I would just make sure that you have Enable notification by email turned on and you don't have any emails unsubscribed. What that will mean is that anytime that GSC notices an error, an issue, that you'll get an email notification. Because if you aren't in the habit of actually logging in and looking at it, there might be some really important things that come up that you aren't aware of. And it's important to go in and check to make sure that those things aren't happening with your site. Because if they are, that could be a really easy win to fix those things. For example, this is actually number five, checking the security and manual actions area. I've also heard some stories of people having manual actions or security issues that they weren't aware of. And essentially what a manual action is is it's Google going in and saying, hey, we are going to flag this website or this platform, whatever it might be, this blog, because there's an issue here. And we think that this issue is worth us kind of artificially restricting the amount of exposure that it gets. And chances are, for those of you listening, you're not going to have this, but There might be one of you, there might be two of you, there might be 10 of you who have some issue in security and manual actions. And if you also have emails turned off or if you haven't looked at those, then that might be something that could be an easy win. When you go in, you see that there's an issue, you correct it, and you have that manual action removed. We're not going to dive deep into the specifics around that, and it should really be a professional who understands search that would help you navigate that. But the action item for you, number five, is just to go and check that area. So after you make sure that email notifications are on, make sure that you check manual actions and security issues in gsc. And what you should see is a green check mark that says no issues detected. That's good, you can move on. If you have email notifications turned on, you'll know that you'll get a notification. When something does come up for that number six, I'm calling this enhancing the enhancements. So enhancements are essentially any kind of additional contextual information that you're providing to Google about your site. Some examples that we have for pinch of yum, breadcrumbs, FAQ guided recipes, recipes, review snippets, site links, search box, and videos. Now, there's lots of other enhancements that you can have, but essentially this is information that's coded in a certain way. And if you're using a recipe plugin or a plugin like Yoast SEO, it should be helping you do this. But it's coded in a certain way to tell Google that this is a certain area. And an easy example is the FAQ section. So if you have an FAQ section, you can use something like Yoast plugin to do this. That's gonna mark up the content in a way that says, hey, this is a frequently asked questions area. These are questions, and below the question is an answer. And what you're looking for here is in the enhancements area is anything that's most importantly an error. And again, you know, red, yellow, green. If it's red, that's Google saying, hey, this is important. You need to check this out and fix this. If you have something that is red, go in and fix that error, because that's going to mean that the enhancement is fully enhanced, it's valid, and there's no issues with it. And there's going to be different errors that might present in all of those different enhancement areas. So breadcrumbs are going to have different issues than faq, than guided recipes, than recipes, then review snippets, and on and on and on. The point here is to spend some time looking through this. Now, if you have emails turned on, you should get a notification when these are discovered, but if not, you can log in and you can just look through all of the different enhancements that are available and make sure that as much as possible that you can get rid of those errors if you do see them. And that's it's, it's not exactly the most fun thing to do, but it provides some pretty clear steps for you to walk through and some pretty clear ways that you can fix that. Google has a lot of information around that. And if you don't reach out to somebody who's a professional, if you're a food blogger pro member, post that in the forum. We'll do what we can to walk through that process and to help you figure out the best way to improve it. And then number seven, this is actually gonna be the area that we are focusing on for the event that we're doing, the less work, more traffic event. And it's around finding content that you can optimize and talking through ways to, to optimize that, things that you can do to improve that content. And the idea with this like less work, more, more traffic concept is you're not taking something from the ground up and hoping that you rank for it. You're finding something that you already are kind of doing well with and you're looking for ways to improve that and optimize it to gain some of that, those that position. So if you're on Google and you're ranking an 8, how do you tweak and change and enhance that content? So you can go from eight to position four. And we're going to provide some actual examples of ways that we've done that with pinch of Yum. And sometimes it's pretty drastic, you know, overnight after you publish the content. You can see there's one example for a keyword where it went from like six to number one. And it's just been there for the past three months for a pinch of yum. And we've done that by using a tool like GSC to go through and to analyze what content can we look at and how can we improve that. So the takeaway here, we're going to talk specifics of that result. But the takeaway here is to spend some time in the research results area and specifically to get familiar with the queries, the search queries area. And you're going to be able to see the queries that the keywords is another word to say that that are most important to you based on the number of clicks and the number of impressions that you're getting from for specific keywords. It's really interesting when you start to spend some time with this and especially when you click in to look at a specific query. And there's four areas that it offers in gsc. Total clicks, total impressions, average click through rate, and average position. A really easy example is the query pinch of yum. And this is a popular query because people are just trying to get to pinch of Yum. And Instead of typing pinchofyum.com, they search pinch of yum and then click on the first result. So average position is 1.1, average click through rate really high, it's 88% and total impressions is 113 and total clicks is 100,000. That's for the last three months for the query pinch of yum when people search that on Google. So you can see when you start to spend some time with this, you look at some of these other keywords that you might have that Google's surfacing for you. You can track to see see where that has ranked over time and if it's gone up or down. And that's what we're going to be talking about in this event. We're going to be talking about ways that you can slice and dice this information to quickly surface content that you can then optimize. And we're going to be talking about some of the ways that you can optimize that as well. Again, the event is coming up for those who are listening in real time. It is coming up next week and that is on Tuesday. Next week it is at 12 Central. You can do the central conversion time. Let me see if I can do that in real time. That is 10 Pacific, one Eastern. And that's the extent of my time zone conversions because we do that all the time with our team and really excited about it. So if you want to check it out, foodbloggerpro.com register. That's where we're going to be collecting anybody who's interested and in notifying you of how you can check that out once we do go live with it or if you want to watch the replay. Really fun to talk through this stuff. I love geeking out on any of these tools. We exist as a company because we want to help you get a tiny bit better every day forever. I hope this podcast allowed you to do a little bit of that. And we're going to be back here as always next week and appreciate you and all that you do for this community, especially Food Blogger Pro members who are helping other members out. It's one of the great joys that we have is creating a community of people who are doing good things in the world. So we will be back here again next week. Thanks for listening. Bye.