Set SEO Strategy: Using the Google Search Console

1. Introduction: Today, we're going to teach about the Google Search Console and how to set strategy with these tools. Today, you can also learn on which keywords are already ranking high or which keywords give the missed most clicks to your website. My name is Marjet Wullink, and I'm already teaching on Skillshare about SEO. For example, keyword research, or how to optimize your pages with keywords. Today, I'm co-hosting this class together with Jill. We met each other here in Amsterdam, but Jill's actually from New York. Because she's a dog lover, she wanted to take up Pam, and that's how we met. Pam is my dog. Well, who here and thanks to co-host. Thank you for doing this. Yeah. My name is Jilly, CNIMA Digital Marketing Consultant. I work with my clients and I help them to drive more traffic to their site, get more conversions on their site. One of the areas that my clients always ask me about is SEO. We've been talking about different strategies and I found out about Google Search Console. I don't know that much about it, but I know that a lot of people talk about it. It's a way to set your keyword strategy, how to figure out what keywords to us, what pages you want to link on. I was hoping today that Marjet would be able to show me how to use Google Search Console, figure out what it is, what it does, and a really easy and fast way that I could get started offering this as a service for my clients. Good. Yeah, that's what we're going to explain today. If you also want to learn this, follow then this class. 2. Class Overview : What is in this class today? There's a few lessons. You see there are eight lessons. The first lesson is just about what is the Google Search Console. Then we're going to the link Google Search Console with your website. If you have a hard time doing this, then you can learn that in the first lesson. Then, which keywords give the most clicks to your website, and understanding which are your top keywords for ranking so which keywords your X-D ranking very high, how to pick keywords that are important for your customer journey. I'm going to talk about customer journey, the travel your customer makes until he's buying your product. I'm going to explain this a little bit more in this class and what you can do with these keywords. Which of those keywords actually create the most search volume, and then we are going to polish it all up so you have a strategy to work with that's very simple and smart. Then a short recap of all of these strategies and the bonus questions, because it's sometimes very weird, you're number one position, but there are no clicks. There are a few reasons why this could be and you can of course, make it better, but sometimes it's not even possible to make it better and it's just like that. That's what I'm going to talk about in this bonus question lesson. Let's get started. This is perfect, so let's do it. Yeah. 3. What is the Search Console?: We're hearing lesson zero about what is the Google Search Console. That's actually a collection of tools that you can use to be more professional about your search engine optimization. So if you want to rank higher on specific keywords, this is a very good tool to use, or if you want to get more clicks on those keywords, then it's also very good. It's actually designed to be more professional with your SEO. In this lesson, I will show you what is the useful to view with these tools because today we're not going to use all the tools of the Google Search Console, but only the one that's about the data. You can also use other tools, for example, how often does Google crawl your website? It can crawl a few pages per day, but it can crawl also 1000 pages per day. This is what you can also see there. But we're not going to talk about that. We're only going to look at the statistics so you can create these SEO strategy. 4. Linking the Search Console to Your Site: So we're in the first lesson here, and it's about linking the Google Search Console to your website. Jill did you ever connect a website to the Google Search Console? So I try to do it a while back and I got to the part where you register and then you have to add a code into the site, and I wasn't quite sure how to do that part of it because I'm not a developer. I don't really have intense technical skills. So maybe it is there an easy way that you could explain to me that you can drop the coding just that anyone would be able to do? Okay. I understand the maybe that it can be hard for people to connect or to link to the Google Search Console, especially if you don't have all the tools for the website. But I'm teaching in this lesson that it can be quite easy, for example, to connect it with your Google Analytics. The only thing is that Google Analytics should be linked good to the website. So sometimes that's not right. Then there are other options, and I will show these other options in this lesson. So let's get started with linking your website and your Google Search Console together. You just type into Google Webmaster Tools. Then you will find a link that you can click on, which says, "Webmaster tools to learn." Then you go to sign in and you login with your Gmail or your Google account, and then you add a property under red button. There you can type in your URL exactly with HTTPS and www or not if you don't use that then add. After that, you get this screen. This is the recommended method, but it's not the easiest one. You should click on this and then download the HTML verification file. Then you upload it to your server, which also your web developer can do. So off of that, you click underneath on verify. But you can also use an alternative method like HTML tag. That's an easy one that will explain to you later how you can do this. So you can copy this whole HTML tag, or you can go to Google Analytics. Then you just try to verify. Thing with Google Analytics is that most of the times your Google Analytics might not be well established for this. So you get, "We are not able to verify property." So I use most times this one the HTML tag. Then you can go, for example, to your website. If you use WordPress, you can go to the Yoast plugin. I'll explain here on my own website. So you go to the backend and you go to Yoast SEO, and then to A. It's called here Algemeen because that's Dutch. But it's the normal, the general functions. Then you go to Webmaster Tools in the top above. There you see Google verification code and you can just paste it there. Then if you would, save it, it just makes this thing smaller. So most of the times you don't have to make this smaller yourself. Then if you now go back to your search console or your webmaster tools, both words are the same. Then you can verify and then it should work. We did it. Congratulations. So this is great. This is how you can get your info. So you see here that there's my dashboard of my search console and you see a lot of things going on. You might not see this because you just added your account. That takes awhile. It might even take a few days. It takes a little bit of time before you see some data here. So then you can start tomorrow. It might be that tomorrow you already have for a few months of data because it started to track data when you started adding Google Analytics. So if you already have Google Analytics in your website, then they'd already started to track this data as well. So you should at least have for one month of data into the Search Console to have a bit of knowledge about your keywords. So let's get into the next class where we can look at this data. 5. Top Clicks to Your Site: Now in less than two, where we're going to look at clicks that are going to your website. You're logged into your Google search console and you see already at least one month of data then we can get started with setting your SEO strategy. What I always like is that I'm teaching with an example. So you really have an example of a website to show about them and why they should choose certain keywords. I'm going to use this website and it's called better places, and what they do, I really like it because they actually connect you to local experts, and then you can make your own travel, your customized travel plan in all the countries in the world. That's very nice. If you want to go and travel, I think it's a perfect match. For example, their products are road trips; road trip to Columbia, to Cuba, or all all these nice countries. Let's dive into this lesson with [inaudible]. Okay, so you're logged into the Google Search Console and you have clicked through on domain that you want to know the data for, and then you see here on the left now still the "Try the new Search Console", and that's what I'm going to do. Even though it's still a beta version, I think that the old one is not available anymore soon. That's why I want to show you this one. For the analytics, we go to "Status" and then "Performance". There you see, for example, the total clicks that come from Google search result to your website, and also the total impressions. These two are default on in this new Google Search Console. What it means, this impressions, is how many times Google users saw a link to your website into Google search results. It gives a graph underneath of these two metrics of the last three months. Underneath there, that data is very interesting. This shows the individual keywords with their clicks and impressions. People have searched for better places travel as [inaudible] and then click through to your website to see what on there or they just had an impression. Now, it is very common that you see here your brand name on the top, but it will be great if there will be also search terms that are more relevant to your products here. For example, the Wadi Mujib Siq Trail, you can click through on this keyword and then you can click here on "Pages", and then you see this page and you could copy this page and then see where it goes to. It goes to Jordan hiking trip because that's the page that's linked to this keyword. You see them here, which people were directed. They were searching for this keyword, they were searching for Wadi Mujib Siq Trail and they got to the page of your hiking in Jordan. Maybe your page is not even optimized for this keyword; Wadi Mujib Siq Trail. As you can see here, it's called Jordan Hiking Trip. Also in the URL, you see that it says, "Jordan Hiking Trip." Here in the subtitle, is not also Wadi Mujib Siq Trail in the right combination. You can click on "Command F", and then you can do Wadi Mujib and Siq Trail. Then you see that's not even found. Wadi Mujib is found but together in a combination, but the Siq Trail is not found. If you would add that combination on the right places to your page, it could already make a lot of difference. So there will be more clicks to your website because you can rank higher. But what it means is that this is a very potential keyword or a keyword set actually that you could maybe start to improve and rank higher and get more clicks. So this is a good way to see if a keyword might have potential and that it's worth to put some effort into it to get it to a higher position if it's not already on the number one. Okay. Now we saw at this less on which clicks people click most to your website, and you can pick some keywords that are most clicked on. But let's not pick right away, because maybe these are not the right keywords yet. We have to do a little bit more, a few steps more to see which are the best keywords. I'm going to take you with me on the next lessons to show you that. 6. Ranking Positions - Part 1 : In this lesson three, we are going to understand on which positions you are now with your website and on which keywords. In the past when there was not a Search Console? Actually, no, it's not so long ago. They didn't have this sheet. They didn't even show these positions yet. What I used to have to do was to search on keywords where I was at. It's very hard see on which positions you were, so just seem too few years, they've changed it and they gave us the positions. I really love to see on which positions you are and that you can try to optimize your phase and rank higher with that keyword. It should be the keyboard to optimize of course. Did you already check this out in the Search Console, the positions, and what did you learn from it, and what did you do with it? I have seen some of my clients that have this, that they were able to see their keywords and if [inaudible] it is a lot of keywords that you would search but then there's also keywords, and some of them doesn't really make sense, that's why you would be ranking for that? Or it seems like even if [inaudible] a keyword or that it might not necessarily drive which business or its added value. That was, I think the big thing that popped out of me that there were a lot of surprises in there. Yeah. That's nice to hear. Yeah, because it's very surprising to see on which keyword you're ranking at. You never try to rank on a keyword and suddenly you're on number 1 with that keyword and you think maybe I should do something with that because I'm already ranking so high. That's what my surprise with this. Yeah, so let's dive into this position. We are again at the Search Console, Status and Performance and then we click through and we leave the click selected and we see default. There's also this total impressions that's selected, I'm clicking and then we click on "Average position." This is the average position in the last three months, so it is always possible that you are on number 1 but because three months ago you were on number 100, it now shows that you are on position number 75 and that's why it's important to click through on the keywords themselves to see how well they are in their position and let's explain this with an example. We scroll down again to the individual keyword and then we see on the right side, now there's also a column with positions, but the order of the keywords is still sorted by the amount of clicks. What we can do is to see on which keywords you're ranking the highest is to click on the positions label and then it starts to order by position, and we want to order by one. You click twice to see the best position on the top. What is important about this data is that you don't have to be number 1, to have a lot of clicks. You see that a lot of search terms that are on the number 1 position are not even clicked on. In the bones lesson, I will tell you why, because that's still good to explain with the older version of the Search Console. What I find interesting, keywords are the ones that are, for example, have a number 3 to 15 in position, but they already have quite some clicks. They have potential because you can start optimizing your page for this keyword and start to rank higher. We make more rows. For example, 100 to show you what seems interesting to me. For example, the keywords that seem interesting to me is a bit more up actually. Let's see here, its on position number 315 clicks, Pemba or Zanzibar, because it is ranked number 3 and it has 15 clicks. It seems interesting and then we go on and we see better places. That's just their brand name. That's not interesting at first hand here, cuba roadtrip as 14 clicks in its own nom position 6. That's an interesting one and the next one, let's see, it is wadi mujib siq trail, 26 clicks and on a position 8.4. You see here that just scroll down the list and check where are the most clicks, so that's what is important to see which keywords could have potential. You can click through and check where the keyword is now at. I want to show you this example with Pemba Zanzibar, so you click through on that keyword, and then you see here some graphs with the average position, how it changed in time, and also when things were clicked on and you see that it's gradually going higher. That's a good thing, and it's still always going up and down, but that's what Google things it has to try to value use. That's why it's going up and down all the time and if you hoover over, you see which position is really at. You see here with number 1, you're number 5, make few, scroll down and click on pages and then you see also the page that belongs to it. You can copy it and then you can paste it into your browser and go to the page to see if they also use Pemba or Zanzibar that was the keyword and they use Zanzibar or Pemba in there URLs already. From the start there. They're not using keywords that they're found on very well, and also not in the first title. Let's see if we find Pemba or Zanzibar somewhere in the text and no, it's not found. We could still make it on this keyword to change it from position number 2.8 to in average to a position number 1. That's very nice to change, so it has potential. 7. Ranking Positions & CTR : It makes perfect sense to me why we would look at the position, so then you know where you already have opportunity, where you are already ranking antisemitism phase. The clicks makes sense to me that you are good to know that people care enough about your listing and are coming through on it already, which is great. But there's another metropolitan area which is the CTR buckling theory. So how would you prioritize that or how would you do that knowing that we've already said that two of the most important words are going to be the positions in clients? I'm going to show you now something with the click through rate to add it into this columns. I would like to explain it a bit what a click-through rate is. We know this term, but for all people its a bit hard and what is a click-through rate? You see a lot for sure it's CTR. Actually means that people have seen your link in the Google search results. Then they click through so for example, if 100 people saw your link in the Google search results and 50 click-through, then your click-through rate is 50 percent. So the higher a click-through rate is, the better. There are even keywords on which you could have 100 percent click-through rate. So lets start into that now. Click the "Average CTR" and see a lot of data here in the graph. Lets also click total impressions, so we have everything together. Then we see this graph with all the different data. Here underneath you see all the data with the clicks the "Impressions", and the "Click-through" rate and the positions. So it is now 400 by the clicks, and we want to order it for something like the CTR, and then you see 100 percent CTR. So they sold once and they also clicked. So that is very good. So they seem to have very good potential for example, here, two impressions and they clicked once, so there is 50 percent click-through rate. Now we would like to see, for example, the waji mujib sq trail. It has 31 clicks, 628 impressions, so it only has 4.9 percent click-through rate. I said that it had a very big potential. Great potential, I mean. Well, is this true? Which metric should I use? Which one is the best, and which keywords should I start with? You see here that actually to click on all the data, it is a bit too much. So that is why we only keep it with the clicks and the positions. Because otherwise, you get hopelessly lost in all this data. So now we saw a lot of data in these four columns and it gets a little bit overwhelming. So where should we look? So that's always hard. That is why it is good that it's your website or it's your clients website's. So you can look with your client and say, "Okay, is this keyword, does it feel connected to you? Do you feel that it's good for your product and it's good for your products is very generally said me now. But what I would like to teach you is a little bit strategy to see where if your keyword is really good to make sales. So you can do that by making a customer journey. What a customer journey is, I am going to teach in the next lesson. 8. Customer Journey: This is Lesson 4 about the customer journeys. Until, did you ever teach or work with your clients with the customer drinks? Yes, I have. It's actually something that we talk about a lot, because as I mentioned, I work with clients and we want more than shopping. We want convergence. In that regard, the customer journey is the most important thing that we have to think about, because we have to find the people who in their customer journey are right in that case where they have enough information. They've done enough research. They know enough that now they're starting to think about converting, maybe buying the product, maybe signing up for a service. That is the person we want, the person that is right in that perfect mindset. Great. Thanks. We're going to do that as well today. First, I want to show you a few very short customer journeys of better places travel and after that some longer version. Let's dive in instead. Today we're now actually showing you the end of the customer journey. People on your website, they know they want to go to Latin America, they go to Cuba and then they just want to have tailor made travel proposals. They click on this button and then they fill into form and they are there. This is a very short customer journey. It was from your homepage, going to Cuba and then going to the tailor made travel proposal. But that's most of the times not to have the customer travels to your product. How does it go? Can maybe they [inaudible] here from a friend that they already know that they want to go to Cuba. Then here the road trip to Cuba. What they do is they just start searching for Cuba road trip. Then you see that they might not like the first few. Then they see road trip Cuba, because it looks very good. It has a good title, as you see here, road trip Cuba. That's what they're searching for. They click here, and it's already on the fourth position. Why would they not take this one? Then they click through and they get to your page about road trip Cuba and you totally get them there and they ask for a travel plan and you have them. You have them, and it's a very short customer journey again. Now I want to talk with you about a longer version of the customer journey which could be relevant to this travel. What I thought about if they would like to get a road trip to Cuba. That's the final goal. Then they are going to fill in the form and they're going to ask for this road trip to Cuba to get a customized road trip. I thought that people would in their orientation phase, for example, if we can show the students skills here, what is that they think about? What people would start in their journey? I thought they will start to see which are the countries that are there in South America. I know I want to go to South America, but where should I go? The next step I thought maybe they are searching for I want to go in December. Which are the best countries to go to in December and then the next step is already. They thought that they were searching on Google. People said, "The best time to go to a South America country is Cuba. I have no idea of its history. I just think, I would love to go to Cuba. They were thinking, "If we want to go to Cuba, which are the highlights of Cuba, what should I not miss? I want to go to Cuba and I know that they have content for that on their website. Then maybe they will think, "There are so many highlights. We want to think about a road trip in Cuba and go through it all." This customer journey, it's quite a long one for these places. But you can also have different customer journeys because they have more products, for product, he should have a customer journey, but what do you think of what I just made? Is it something that you'd also make with your lines? Yeah. I think what you're saying makes sense about how you apply for photography carries that particular road trip within Cuba. For my clients, there's a lot of other ways that you could approach it too. There might be other points earlier up in the customer journey. If they don't necessarily have to be at the commercial plane, if maybe somewhere along here, you could get their e-mail address, or you could get their numbers. Yeah. We get this, then you could follow up with two. But for this say, I think you'd have to get the people that were all the way at the [inaudible] , they know that they want to go to trip to Cuba. Yeah, exactly. To set a strategy, to start with setting a strategy, it's good to focus on this end of your customer journey. If you want to extend your strategy, then you can go into the orientation phase of your customer journey because there's also all this phases, orientation, very broad until decision-making and conversion. This last one we're going to focus on, so you're getting more clear with your keywords. Now we're going to check the list with the keywords and which keywords are belonging to this last phase. We are now going to go again to the Google Search Console, status, performance. You also click on this position tab, so we have the total clicks and the positions clicked, you see a column, then you scroll down and you see here then I already need this, you have to click twice in the position, the positions are ordered by the highest one, like the number 1 on the top. Then you check if the first ones that you see that are starting from the number 2, because the number 1 is not really so exciting because you're already on number 1, you cannot really improve it so much anymore. If you have no clicks but your number 1, that's what I will tell you in bonus. But here, for example, it's also not so relevant for the customer journey because it's your brand name. Brand names are not relevant in the customer journey normally. We go on and we go and check which of the first ones has a lot of clicks. A lot of clicks is most of times more than 10 or more than the average, 2,1,0,2 is not really a lot, but 16, that's quite a lot more than the other ones. Pemba or Zanzibar are places in Tanzania. If it would be that they reach out for a road trip in Tanzania. That's where this client, this better places comes in with that product [inaudible]. They're still making a choice if they want to go to Pemba to Zanzibar maybe, that's a good one. It's a very important keyword but not right now, because I first want to show you to start with keywords that are in the decision phase of the customer journey that would lead to more conversion. We'll help you do start to love SEO, because it gives direct revenue after you did some words in the decision phase. Once you've done that, then you can go on to more orientation phase words. If we scroll down, we see here again, better places twice that's a brand name, we scroll down more. Cuba road trip it has 14 clicks in some position six. Well, it has great potential. This is definitely in the last phase of their customer journey because they can go directly to book a road trip in Cuba. Let's check out if there's one more. Here on the way, we see also road trip Cuba, which is a variation of Cuba road trip, in the next lesson we're going to see which of these variations has the most search volumes maybe is more potentially good as a keyword. That's what we are going to show you, this one , but five is not really doing so good, I want to move on, to a little bit better one, there we see [inaudible]. It's also because I know that there's one that has more clicks. This one, I would like to tell you more about these Wadi Mujib Siq trail that we already also discussed a bit. It's a keyword that's actually on the border of consideration and decision phase. But for now in this example, and because it has so much potential, we put it into the decision phase because people are aware they want to go hiking in Jordan and better places can arrange all the facilities to go to do this and to make sure that the road trip to make this hiking trip in Jordan is a great experience. It's to do hiking in Jordan is more adventurous thing than to search for a beach place in Tanzania. I think that's why these keywords like Pemba or [inaudible] that those are two beach places in Tanzania. That's why I think that Wadi Mujib Siq trail, the people that are there are more likely clicking through to lead them to a better places. Customized trip. It's also what you feel yourself would rather make a lead or a conversion, then you have to go for that. I think that Wadi Mujib Siq trail can make a conversion better than the other Pemba or Tanzania beaches. Now we have two keywords sets that we want to explore. We want to explore the options in terms of if it's really derived keyword, or if there's a better choice for that page to use another keyword set, maybe in another combination. That's what we're going to do in the next lesson. Now we picked two key words that seem relevant, like the Cuba road trip and the body Wadi Mujib Siq trail. It's a hard one. But the Wadi Mujib Siq trail I've been already saying it a few times, now I should know the hiking is [inaudible].These two keywords seems to be in the last phase of his customer journey that's why I want to pick them up and I think that these are important. But you also should checkout, for example, is hiking in Jordan and the Wadi Mujib Siq trail? How often do people search for this keyword? So what's their search volume? That's what we're going to look at in the next slides. 9. Search Volume: Now we're going to look at the search volume, and we don't only use to Google Search Console, but also the Keyword Planner. To used Keyword Planner, you can also look at my other class that I was teaching about how to do the keyword research, and then you also can see how you can use this tool. But it changed a little bit, so I also show it in this class a little bit more, but that's what we're going to check now in this class, lesson. We're going to search console, the status and performance. You click on this one and this one also selected, so those have two colors. Then you move down and you see the individual queries here with the keywords, and we want to search for keywords that are related to Wadi Mujib Siq trail that you already have positions on. You click on this File to filter, and then you have this one selected and that's what you going to filter by, and then we're going to filter on Mujib, for example. What you can do then is you can copy this whole list. I go to a new Google Spreadsheet, and I add here the content I pasted, and then you see that this column, that's where they all are, and then you can copy them because you cannot copy only this column out of the Search Console, so that's why it's handy to first copy paste it into a Google spreadsheet. Then we're going to Google AdWords, and here we go to Tools and then to Keyword Planner. You see here that I already have some campaigns running and you have to have that to do keyword research because now we're going to search for the search volume of these variations of the keyword that might have a better search volume than the keyword that you want to go for, so then you can see which one should I choose? Which one has the best potential? What you can do is, in Google AdWords, you can make an account and you can make an advertisement for like €1 day and then only make it into a green button if you want to do your research and you can just pause it afterwards after you did your research, so it's not really that you have to always have it running to use the Keyword Planner. But it's a very good tool to see, for example, you can find other keywords that's not what we're going to use today, this is what I'm explaining also in my Google research other clouds, so you can check that out and then here's that Google search volume and forecast. Here you see that you can also still go back to the other previous version of the Keyword Planner, then actually it's better because they have these two in one which I like a lot, but because they're probably not going to have this key, this link here for a long time and this one will be removed and we'll only work with this and that's why I explain you into the new version. Here we're going to paste all the keywords that I would like to check for their search volume. Then here you see quite nothing yet because it's just forecasts and we can click on Historical Metrics, and you can scroll down and then you see what you were just looking at like the key words here with their month effort, monthly searches, so what do you see is that here's Wadi Mujib Siq trail, the one that we wanted. It has actually a lot of monthly searches. Wadi Mujib has more, if we click on this, you can see which has the highest one. It is growing, so the forecasts also gets growing, that's also with Wadi Mujib, you see that Wadi Mujib hike is going lower so that's whole things to consider, if it's a keyword that will be good especially for a future. I think you can look at all these keywords and see okay, well, this also annulus growing here or these ones start to grow. But I think still this is very good, it has a low competition and it's a little bit too general maybe, so that's why I would always focus on this one. Because you already have a high position or the position in Google, you already have clicks, I think you should go for this one, but because we know it's a hiking trip in Jordan, I would also like to add some words to it. We click twice back. If you want to add words to this list, we have to delete one. For example, I'm going to delete this one and then I'll do hiking in Jordan, and you see that it has also 590 searches per month. Actually they're the same but because you already have a position on this word, you can better go for this one than this one. That's why I would recommend to stay and stick with this Wadi Mujib Siq trail and start to optimize the page that belongs to that for this keyword. What you can still do is see if there's other options of hiking in Jordan that maybe have even more potential lines, so you can do here, hiking Jordan, just send them with extra because I would like to explain it to you, and then you see a lot of different words. Jordan trail might also be interesting. These things, it's also interesting, but Jordan trail is also part of the Wadi Mujib Siq trail so this could be a keyword that you might also introduce, but for now, I would still stick to this Wadi Mujib Siq trail. Maybe also because this one's already going down here and click "Tasting the words" and do here. Again add it was Jordan trail and we do hiking in Jordan and we get started. Then we go to historical metrics, we do that for searches then you see Jordan trail, yes. It is higher for human than Wadi Mujib Siq trail, but this one is going more up, and this one is going more down here and because you already score on this one and not yet on this one, and not yet on this one, I would still go for this, but this is also what you have to find yourself, which one do you like the most? Why I would suspect that this word will lead to more conversion because they did already lot of orientation about it so they want to book a trip with you to go hiking in Jordan then I think this one is the keyword set you have to go for. 10. Search Volume Part 2: I want to show you very quickly because otherwise it takes little too much of your time to see how it goes with the Cuba road trip. So I just did Cuba, and then we see here also the keyword, and we again take the most potential ones from the top and let's see if there's like 10, and otherwise, we delete the other one. Let's copy these first ones, and we go to my Google's spreadsheets and I paste it all over, and we take the first 10, and then we go back to Google Ads, click, "Get the search volume," paste it in. So we added these variations, road trip Cuba with spaces, Cuba road trip with spaces, Cuba roadtrip without spaces, road trip Cuba without space as well road trip in Cuba but, Google makes it into born rows, so it doesn't show all the different things, but it just shows you all the different variations. Just shows you the variations as he or she thinks, what is most, well, for you, so I will do this again, and we see roadtrip Cuba, not to each other return, it's medium, and Cuba roadtrip is a low competition in the Google AdWords, but you can almost say that it's a bit seen if there's no competition. In the Google AdWords, it might also be that there's no competition in the Google organic search. So I think that if you are already now ranking higher in Cuba road trip than on road trip Cuba, then it's better to focus on Cuba road trip because it has a low competition. The only thing is it's going either down, this one is also going down, and it might be because now we are in a [inaudible] here as I call this, so it's a whole day period, so that's so wide, it might go down. People are now on holiday. So yeah, I would go for Cuba road trip, and the one that you are already, performing on well, that version because it doesn't matter too much. Cuba road trip, yeah, I would go for this one actually. I think it's actually very hard decision to make, so maybe you can also see if what's the average CTR and then start to think, well, this one Cuba road trip has the highest Click-Through Rate, so that's what I would go through for, because if you be seen and if you would go higher, it's easier to get found on that one. So yeah, that would be one of the things, it's also that you're already on one of the most highest positions, so here you can use the matrix, the CTR to see, "Okay, which one am I going to choose?" I will choose this Cuba road trip as a combination, because you will also be found on the other combinations, but especially, you always want to go for one of the combinations that you want to go for, and the other combinations you will also use maybe, but not too much. So yeah, to see with this matrix, I would go for Cuba road trip, and it's just good to make a decision to call for one of these combinations than not to make a decision at all and use them all the same. So that's what I will do, and let's see how it already is going with that, the Cuba road trip, because this is called a road trip Cuba and not Cuba road trip, and still you are getting on the highest position. Let me see if that's really true, if that ones. If we click through and we go to the belonging page, we see it, Cuba road trip, let's see if it's also here, yes. Cuba road trip, it's in the URL, but it's not yet here in the heading, so if you would use Cuba road trip more on these good places, instead of road trip Cuba, then you might get higher on Cuba road trip and just add sometimes the variant, the variation road trip Cuba, so it seems more natural. For more optimization tips, and how to do that, you can watch the other lesson class of me about period optimization and keyword research. But this is what I would do, so I would go for these two variations. I would go for this variation, the Cuba road trip, because it has almost the same clicks, but the highest Click-Through Rate and it's already on the highest position. So yeah. That's it for Cuba and for this search volume, that ones. If we click through and we go to the belonging page, we see it, Cuba road trip, tailor-made, let's see if it's also here, yes. Cuba road trip, so it's in the URL, but it's not yet here in the heading, so if you would use Cuba road trip more on these good places, instead of road trip Cuba, then you might get higher on Cuba road trip and just add sometimes the variant, the variation road trip Cuba, so it seems more natural. For more optimization tips and how to do that, you can watch the other lesson class of me about keyword optimization and keyword research. But this is what I would do, so I would go for this variation, the Cuba road trip, because it has almost the same clicks, but the highest Click-Through Rate and it's already on the highest position. So this Cuba road trip might be interesting, and the good thing is that they did not yet optimize their page for that, so. That's why it's very interesting to use this keyword. 11. Polish Strategy: In this lesson, we're going to polish your keywords to make it into a strategy. What we just saw in this lesson's that we picked two of your most promising keywords actually. I think that it's the best way to do, is to always pick two every week or every month. What do you think that's reasonable or that you can do, that's feasible, that's the word, feasible for you to do, so you don't do it only yearly because it's better to optimize in bits, because Google likes it if you change your website regularly. For this reason, it's also good to regularly look at this SEO strategy and we look at which keywords are for you very good to optimize. Would you think that this is a good way to do it regularly and optimized? Yes, I think that this is so optimal not only as a search guideline, but in general this is what I think, pick one or two areas to focus and do those really well and see what happens and then learn and optimize, then pick your next site. So it can be super overwhelming when you think that you have to make your whole site SEO perfect, how to analyze Regularly posting or optimizing actually your pages for the keywords that you chose is a good idea. If you don't know which one you choose and it's too hard for you to do, we can also do it together because now in Skillshare, there's something new and you can have a one-on-one with me via Zoom or via FaceTime or Skype. It would be really nice to connect with you. If your example is good for everybody, I can add these as bonus to this existing task, so everybody learns of that example and you get some promotion. That would be very nice that we could do this one to one, and we'll go to the next lesson. 12. Class Project : We have a little bit of a different view, but I just forgot to tell you, but projects, that's why I want to tell you now. Because there's also of course, a project that you can do. You can download the editable PDF fitted in, filling your keywords. Filling the URL of the page as belonging to the keywords. Where you are in the search result, which positions, and how many clicks you already have. Then you can screenshot it after you fill in and upload it to the project. For example, we can use it to check it with them [inaudible]. Maybe you put it in, just uploaded the project just after you did it. Then you can see in a month how it went, where you're at now. Then you can again upload to keywords or search terms on the positions and those things. You can still see how far you've grown. It's a little bit that you can have your default and uploaded as a project. So you see how much you've grown. I would really love to see how it's going with all these keywords. Then in a few months to see how well you have grown by using this SEO strategy. I'm looking forward to seeing your projects coming up. In this video, I will show you how you can edit it, but it's really simple. Here you see the project PDF and we can edit it, for example, with CubaRoadTrip. As you also see in the position of any example. In here you fill in, the position and here you can fill in the clicks that you had and your URL. For example, Better Place travel.com/cubaroadtrip. It's very simple here and you can add your second line with the second keywords and position clicks and URL. After you fill this all in with your own content because I will show you here an example, then you can screenshot this page PDF, and then upload it to the project. Because it's a lot less difficult. If you upload a PNG or back to the Skill Share website. Then if you do with a PDF, it just takes a lot of time and will very difficult. So this is easier. 13. Recap Making Your SEO Strategy: Okay, I'm going to give you a short recap, very quick, to walk you through the steps that we did, so you can remember. The first step was to link your website to the Google Search Console. Then to analyze the best keywords by clicks, the positions, and maybe the click-through rate, which are the most important steps to start with in the customer journey, so that's how you can choose keywords. It should be in the last phase when you start so that you see quicker conversions, which gives you the stimulation to go on with SEO and that's what I'd like you to do to get excited about SEO. That's why it's good to start with key words that are in the last first phase of your customer journey. Then to check if they have some potential value by looking at their search volume. This is a very short recap, so then you can do this every month, a few keywords, and start to get your SEO rocking. 14. Bonus: #1 but Zero Clicks? What's up?: What's up when you are at position to move on, but you have no clicks? Well, there can be more things being not as expected. The first thing is, is that your click-through rate is very low, because of the fact how you show up in the search results. This might not be look so nice. People don't tend to click through when they see your major title, and you make the description. Let's look for Pemba, Zanzibar. Then we see that we are here. Pemba, Zanzibar, I don't know if you've had a good click-through it, but if it doesn't look exactly well. Maybe if you're number one, but you think, well, I don't know if they offer. Everything I would like to know. Here, there's a choosing between two tropical islands. They are really saying what I would like. Then I would click through on this one. But if it would not be like that, then you'd not to click through it, you just go. Even though you're in number one or number two position. People are checking out. Is it really what I want? Yes. They see the first line is choosing between two tropical continents. Well, that's what people like, that they really click through on something they think that they would expect. That's one of the reasons why our number one or number two. That people don't click through that because how this looks like. But let's now take a look at other keywords. Now, I made all the data available, so all the position click through, clicks and impressions, and I positioned the number ones on the top. For example, the first one. If you copy this one and you put it into the search results, you just search for it, I mean, you see that there's something with a movie going on. Here, does love videos. It means actually that this is not matching. This keyword might rank high on first position. Sometimes I will show you also later why something on the first position, because you're not always done. Well, on average from the you are on number one position. But what you're offering is not what they're searching for it. They're searching for a movie. But you're offering something like a hotel in [inaudible] , then they will not click through on that, and you see here, if you click through and if you don't look at the position, you see here that what seems very stable on number one position, but it's also local. Maybe I search, I see you. I don't see it. But if somebody else searches, they see so you cannot count it for your what you see. It's everywhere different, which is called Local SEO. But here I also want to show you that sometimes you're not even there, so here this is Pemba, Zanzibar. I've clicked through in the old search console for this year, you can click through to the new version that I clicked on the old search console and Pemba ,Zanzibar. We also see how it's going, so only the positions in green and then some of them even adult. You're sometimes not even there in the search results, so that's why also people cannot be replaced through if you are on number one position because you're not even there. Sometimes you just showed up once in the search results and they put your number one in three months and well, that one day or that one moment. No one click through. That's quite okay. I'm probably it was not the keyword that you want. Let's go back. Here, we see all the queries if I delete this one. Then a humble position, click there right. Here twice. Then for example, this one, this is not a movie that is small igneous hotels. I copied and I have already searched for them. If I would search for it without a database travel, and highly, I will find better place, website because the browser knows I'm in [inaudible]. They would give me the results first of. Websites that are in the Netherlands part, it seemed to be more relevant to me. That's why I put better places traveled behind it. Here you see Rumah Tengah Sawah, and while that seems very good, But then the description is not so nice, so I will not click through on this one. Then I would maybe better click through those now website or something. Or I go down and I look for when a bed and breakfast Booking.com. We're above Booking.com with this, of course, because we search for ourselves, the better place. But that's one of the reasons. There's actually a few reasons or the keywords not matching with you, so doesn't matter. The keyword is a movie. Instead of what you're selling or make a description or title are not so nicely and attracting that you would click on it even though your number one, then you'd click on number two, that could be the case or you're just shown up, or maybe even pull ones on the number one wants in the search results. How can you even think that people would also click through that one at a time? That might be all the cases. I will not be looking too much at this click-through rate. That's what I wanted to say because it can be wary and confusing. But if you really know that this is right keyword and you want to have a lot of clicks and your number one anything. There's a lot of people searching for this keyword and it matches with the colon. Then I'm offering why is not working. Then you can start to play with how you look. With how you have your mate and your SEO title and your SEO description on made and that you make it more attractive so more people click through. That's the answer to this. 15. Conclusion and Thanks: Hey, guys. Thanks for watching this class and that you've seen everything, even the bonus material. Thanks Jill for being my co-host today. That was really nice. Thank you so much. This is so helpful for me to know where to get started in this massive world of Google Search Console, and SEO, and strategies. Thank you so much for walking me through all this. You're welcome. We will do in the nearby future an AMA, an ask me anything. The two of us. So if you also have some questions to Jill, you can ask this in the AMA. So we would really like to chat with you there and see you there. Good luck with your SEO strategy.