How to Use Google Search Console

Transcript: How to Use Google Search Console

This transcript of How to Use Google Search Console comes from the video's captions, lightly cleaned. Click a time and the set jumps to that moment.

🎙️ Introduction & Welcome

0:00 Welcome back folks to the David Quaid SEO show. This is episode seven. In this show, we're going to be looking at GSC, Google Search Console. How you can use it to find out more about your website, find out how it's really performing, find search terms, keywords. There's a host of things you can do with GSC. Introduce yourself to the audience, Dave. Yep. So I've been doing SEO. It's something I love. I think it's in this economy, it's one of the greatest ways to work. I love doing SEO. I think it's easy. I think people over complicate it. I think more people should be doing SEO and I think people should get better at it.
You are. But you are the king of it. So you would say that, would you? I don't think the mere mortals find it too easy. But there we go. So like I say, we're going to be looking at GSC. We're going to go for a little break and then when we come back we'll go straight into it. Where do we start? How would you introduce GSC to somebody new to it? A broad

📊 What is GSC vs Google Analytics

1:11 Outline, David.
A broad outline. It's your number one insight into what Google thinks of your website and how Google's managing your website. That's the best way to explain it. You can't do SEO without it. Now, when we were talking about the notes for the show, Dave, I mentioned Google Analytics, and you said that could be a completely different show, but what's the difference in what GSC does and what Google Analytics does? What is there a bit of overlap or do you see it or can you give two examples where GSC would be the right tool and where you might be better off looking at Google Analytics or do they complement one another? I suppose it's all of that really, isn't it? I'm guessing that.
Yeah. So, a really simple way to think of it is this. GSC tells you why you got traffic from Google and it tells you how you're getting traffic from Google and where the traffic came from within Google. So, it's everything before you got to visit. It also tells you why you're not getting visits. That's the most important thing. GA4 only tells you where you got traffic from and what they did after arriving. So Google is how you got traffic and GA4 is what they did on your site. So everything is before and after. And so that's why they're so different. You can see search console data in GA4, but it's coming from search console. Analytics cannot give you any more color to it. It can only tell you what happened afterwards. The same for ads. Your ads interface tells you where you got traffic and why you didn't get traffic for certain things. And GA4 tells you what the value of that traffic is.

🎯 Striking Distance Keywords

2:50 So just go on our journey. I scoured the internet. I found some topics that David looked at them and scoured at them there. But we came to an agreement. So let's start off. Find your striking distance key words. What does this mean? No.
So basically as you're planning your content and you're thinking about what you should be ranking for, Google will start to put you into different indexes, different keyword groups that people are searching for. And what you can do from taking what a takeaway from this is what keywords am I in striking distance ranking for but I'm not. So rather than looking at a whole new set of keywords you can see keywords that you're potentially in position 8 9 15 17 that Google thinks your domain can rank for and you can then focus down on those particular keywords and start ranking for them. So, it's telling you, here's your next series of content that you can rank for. It's the lowhanging fruit. It's the easiest keyword, keyword research in the world.
So, these different buckets, these different categories, can you expand a little bit on that? What's that?

🧠 How Search Engines Really Work

4:09 Yeah, sure. So, it a funny thing about a search engine is that it doesn't actually search anything. Every it's the oldest trick in the book, right? What Google what search engines do is they put in they create tables and they try to predict what people are going to search for in advance. So if people type in bus to New York or plumber in Boston, it's got all these pre-prepared lists. They're just basic tables with websites in them. And the websites are in order of what Google thinks is the best result for each phrase. As Google goes around the web indexing, crawling the web, indexing content, it builds this list. The list is pre-prepared. That's how it get it's getting you the answers so quickly. Neither LLMs nor search engines do any searches. They have these lists pre-prepared. The first piece of magic is Google tries to take out the differences in different phrases and boil them down to single indexes or single groups of phrases. So when you go to search console and 50 people search for this and 75 people search for this, the underlying keyword was very different and very unique and had might may have had extra words in it and Google corrals them or groups them into these keyword search phrases. That also makes it easier for searching, but it also makes it easier for dealing with new searches or variations between different people as it once it breaks the whole world down into these billions of different queries. It has these pre-built tables that it keeps adjusting the order of domains or pages within those. It has a pre-prepared list. And so when you type in a search phrase, all it's doing is sending you that list back. And that's why it's so fast.

5:51 That's why it delivers it in a hundredth of a second.
Right. And that's that's how it can do that.
It's the only way it can do that. Exactly.
That's a bit different to what a lot of people are saying, isn't it?
It is. Yeah.
That's why you fundamentally don't understand, do they?
And the same thing for LLMs. They just can't search anything on demand, right? They either have the answer in their inherent training or they go to a search engine, get documents, and then synthesize that. And again, they don't do that in real time either. It doesn't work out very well.
Yeah. But you're not a message, David. They're becoming odd. They're going to kill us in a couple of years. We're all going to die. Didn't you know that, David?
Absolutely. I've never been so glad to be 50.

📈 High Impressions, Low CTR Keywords

6:40 Oh, God. God help us. There we go. Bit English sarcasm, our beloved audience. Onto the next one. Spot high impressions, low CTR keywords. What's this about?
So, I think a lot of people, especially if they're coming from other platforms like TikTok or YouTube, Instagram, they look at impressions and clickthrough rate. Clickthrough rate in search console is really more of a track record than something you can improve. You can't improve click-through rate with meta descriptions or content like you can on Facebook or in ads. In Search Console, the only way to increase your position is to rank higher and increase your authority. What you're looking really at is what your click-through rate for keywords that you're trying to focus on and realize that if your clickthrough rate starts to drop at a high position, you're going to lose that position. If you're looking at impressions with low click-through rates, you're probably looking at a page level. And so, you need to move to a query level or you're looking at keywords that have more ads or map focus. But what you're looking to do is find what we call high KEI keywords, keyword efficiency index. So typically keywords with a high number of impressions show volume, right? So Google is forcing lots and lots of searches into those predictable patterns.

8:10 And if you've got a low position for that keyword, but you still see high impressions, that's a very good keyword to go after because you're already naturally ranking in that area. You're already visible in that index and it has volume. In other words, you're not going to write a piece of content and rank in first position only to find that there's nobody searching for it. So, if you look at high impressions and a relatively low position, like again, 17 is a good place to start, it means that you're you don't have enough authority for the content that you have. But if you create content that's more relevant to that particular phrase, you stand a good chance of ranking. So, it's like a no-brainer. Like it's the best place to go hunting for keywords and for content.
So,
I got a follow question and it's related to all our conversations so far. You like our last week's show that was very popular seemed to be popular with the audience got a lot of feedback. You debunked that it's doing a quality check, but then what in what you just said, you said relevance.

9:24 How do you if you got a page, a blog post, a page, and it's in it's around 151 17 in that no man's land, it shows some possibility, but how do you increase the relevance of that page or that? So, so effectively what we're talking about is where you've got pages will rank in multiple tables, right? Multiple different search phrases. Some they'll be number one and others they'll be two and some they might be 17. So, let's say you've created pages already and they're all ranking for what you designated them to be. Right? So, if you're asking about hotels in Palm Beach and your page is ranking number one for hotels in Palm Beach, it's probably called hotels in Palm Beach. It's probably the document name. And that's where Google looks at the relevance of the document to the search phrase is in the name of the document. It's just that simple. What we're doing is talking about looking for ancillary keywords. Ignoring the keywords you rank number one for, going to search console, looking at the table of information, sorting by the highest number of impressions, and then changing the starting point of the table from the position being number one to the position being number 17, for example.

10:45 And that shows you other keywords that future content can rank for, not your existing content. So, if you're looking at your table and okay, you published a document called hotels in Palm Beach and it's number one and then you go and say, "Show me all of the keywords that I also rank for beyond position 16, right? As a way of eliminating cannibalization or reducing the chance of cannibalization. You'll start to see queries with the highest number of impressions that could be bed and breakfast in Palm Beach or hotel stays in Palm Beach or resort stays in Palm Beach. And then you can now go and create a new document that matches that search that is relevant to it by virtue of its name. So you would create a new post, best resort stays in Palm Beach. And because your other document about hotels is already ranking for that, this page stands a very good chance of coming in at a much higher position in that index. So when you look at a page in search console, it's not just ranking for one phrase, right? You're going to see impressions and clicks being earned on a variety of other phrases. And this is a way of saying if I now expand my content to encompass these semi-local semi lowhanging fruit with high volume, I can now grow my traffic and grow my visibility on that site.

12:15 It's that you're using that data that document is bringing you to find more keywords to create content for.
I think I've got the picture. So let's

🔄 Period-on-Period Comparison & Authority

12:25 Go to number three. Use period on period compar comparison to val validate strategy. What does this mean Dave?
So basically when you're looking at too many people look at their total impressions total clicks and the problem is that you have phrases that are going up and down. You have positions that are going up and down and you have search behaviors that are changing. And so if you have relatively flat traffic, that usually means that you have as many pages going up as you have pages going down. And so that really represents a challenge and an opportunity where if you can find the pages and the queries that are going down, you can arrest that loss in traffic, help steer the page back to relevancy to the topics, regain traffic, and then you can also see what keywords you could potentially add to create new traffic. So flat traffic really means unaddressed traffic. Shrinking traffic means lost authority. And so the way in which you start to analyze what's really going on is to take a look at your last week or your last month and compare it to a previous point in time. So you take a starting date and you look at the last week and the previous week or the last month and the previous month, the last 90 days, etc. What you really want to do is compare the last week, especially if you've been losing traffic since, say, January or June, and take that comparison time and instead of having it a side by side, move it backwards in time, slide it back six months ago to June or beyond June and see what pages and what queries lost the most amount of positions. And then you can decide is that did Google do that because of a relevance issue? Did Google do that because the user was unsatisfied and went continued their search after reading your content and your content didn't help them? Or is that because you lost authority for other reasons and you need to spin around and correct it or should you just avoid that keyword and start looking at other keywords. So I think the first problem with analysis is stop looking at the top level down.

14:40 Start looking at pages, individual pages and individual search queries by page and spend your time there and look at pages with volumes and then instead of doing sidebyside week comparison, do a week not the immediate week but a week from two months ago or 3 months ago or six months ago
Will tell you where you've lost the money.
Yeah. What's
And it's very easy to do that.
Yeah, as we mentioned last week, we Google over the last 18 months, two years has I'm looking for the right word here, David. There
Tightening authority.
Yes. Thank you. Tightened authority.
Exactly. So,
So how does that affect what you just outlined? Yeah, I was actually before this I was on a podcast with Colin and Charles Floate who are two phenomenal domain experts and the nearest seed ranking methodology that both Google and common crawl use. So what we said on that podcast is how much the SEO economy is mirroring the world economy right now. The world economy especially the US economy is struggling with quantitative easing, printing money, debt and the value of the dollar. The same thing is happening in SEO. Google is devaluing the value of links, right? And what's happening is people are getting their authority stretched out and it's being stretched between too many pages.

16:11 They're losing authority. It's coming down and you get that staggered traffic drop. And so people often say, I got hit in June or I got hit in January and in the last 6 months I've been losing 10% of traffic. That's not really a hit. That's an authority management problem and search console is a great way to identify that and arrest that lack of authority and that lack of clicks by looking at what are the keywords that are coming onto pages. What keywords have stopped driving clicks? What keywords have changed or metamorphosized in that period? And how do I either take my page and republish it targeting a better keyword with better intent. So for example, if I was ranking for press for community sites and I noticed that I was seeing more and more searches for schools and I started losing clicks for schools and then I look at my page and my page structure and I don't really have any headlines that talk about schools, then I can see why Google is causing this divergence and I'm losing clicks on schools. And I can make one of two decisions. I can either add schools to my WordPress for communities page or I can build a new page about WordPress for schools and I can branch out content in a new way and recapture those clicks through a new page. So instead of looking at the page saying, "Oh, it got hit or I got lost traffic or this," it's to find out what specific keywords changed that you were getting traffic for 6 months ago. And then are those is it specific keyword groups that has like Google was matching us and thought this was a good match 6 months ago and today for whatever reason it either thinks we're a bad match or it thinks someone else is a better match which is the same thing right because it's rotation effect and then I can say do I build new content or do I edit the page and take into account what I was being matched with and try to increase the relevance.

18:07 So your relevance comes from very simply the document name and the titles inside your page. So your H2s, your H3s, those tell Google if they match what people are searching because Google's just a relevance engine.
Yes, relevance. Last week I said a relationship. It's a relevance
Engine. Yeah,
I think I'm getting it. But I can also, you know, I'm going to answer my own question there. I also think a lot a lot of business owners or people feel a bit overwhelmed by what you've just outlined because but the answer is hire somebody like you but or somebody similar if you can afford to but how is there any way to make this seem a little bit less overwhelming?
Yes. I think what we could do is we could do a 5 minute screen share at the end
When you're ready and then
I can show people that it's really simple to reconfigure search console and we could either borrow one of your sites or I have some R&D sites that we can anonymize safely and people can have we can just show how we would do that. Now just to finish off before we go for our mid break is I said GSC and back links and you it's not a great tool

🔗 Backlinks, Bing Webmaster Tools & Internal Links

19:32 Really think you think Bing Webmaster Tools does a better job maybe can go you can go into that a little bit
Sure search console has three link reports one is for internal links again it's not very helpful the second is a sample report of backlinks now if you've got a small number of backlinks like 30. They'll all show here. And then it has a third report which is most a sample of the most recent backlinks. And they're not the most recent. They're not a sample and they're not all. It's a weird if you've ever had a SA and you have the headlamp switch and it has three positions and not one of the three positions turns the headlamps off. So I don't know why they have them, but they do. They have three positions and they're all a different type of on. One is on with brights and one is on without brights where you have to hold the brights on. It's called city driving. I just call it silly driving, but it's the way as designing them more know more than me. If you want to do backlink analysis, you need to use a tool like Bing Webmaster Tools that shows all of them. And Bing Webmaster Tools will show you all links for any domain that it doesn't consider spammy. And you can put your domain name and then compare to any other domain name or from anywhere in the web and it will show you all of the back links it has on record and it's much more I guess it shares a lot more data than search console which is very bad. So search console really only works at a small number of links for your site whereas being web master tools and I think I already have a video on my YouTube somewhere that goes through it.

21:01 Oh yeah. So definitely have a look at Bing.
I think when it comes to looking at internal links, which is a question you asked, and I always use the word judiciously, which means sparingly looking at pages to pages, try to get pages with a phrase that's relevant to the page you're linking to rather than creating hundreds and hundreds of links. I someone that I'm very fond of on X shared an article from Black Hat World where somebody was saying it didn't matter how many links they put in. It was a quote from I think a 2017 post, but it really looked like somebody was who was really creating a pitch for a tool that they developed. I always say start with three links because it's just a good place to start with. I assume most people have very little authority. So start with one link. Take a page that ranking, take a page that you're about to publish and link into that page so that Google can find context and start there. The number of links you want to put into pages, internal pages is up to you. It doesn't matter. There's no hard and fast rules. What's more important is that you start to learn how if you take your one page that's ranking very well for WordPress for schools and you link that to your page about WordPress for universities and see how that PageRanks and performs after putting that link in.

22:16 That's what I'm trying to get people to learn and to develop their own rule set. That makes sense. Well, before we go for our mid break, I just want to ask this and I'm not asking for a direct answer because I think it's impossible. So, we've described this landscape with using GSC and how you could use it to make judgment calls about how Google is viewing your website. But obviously we're in the last quarter of 2026 and large learning models are a

🤖 LLMs vs Traditional Search

22:55 Reality Perplexity Anthropic ChatGPT. How does this landscape that I've that we just talked about also affects how the large learning model sees a page sees is are is it something that they're going to mention when they do a reply to a query?
I guess an analogy that's forming in my head is how do you equivocally compare the internet of yesterday and the internet of tomorrow with LLMs? And
This is an enor it's unfair. This is an enormous question to ask you. So, I'm going to build on on what we said in the previous podcast today and previous podcasts that we've done, and I'm going to compare SEO of today and yesterday to building a farm. So, you own a piece of property, you grow corn, you grow flour, you grow grass, and you raise cattle on it, and you sell those commodities out into the marketplace, right? And your inputs are your link economy. And if you want to think about what LLMs are on top of that, think of LLM as a restaurant. Instead of you buying corn and buying cattle and buying wheat, you're buying steaks and flour and as a restaurant, you're synthesizing it or putting all of that together and serving up an entire meal, right? So before as a client you would be looking at who's selling flour, who's selling cattle, who's selling corn, and I'm going to buy that and use those as inputs. LM take those inputs and turn it into a three course meal like a restaurant does, right? So they take your corn, their meat, their tomatoes, their flour, and they make a salad and they cook a steak and put it on the side. And I think it's at the bottom the same thing. In order to get to a steak, you still have to start with grass.

25:05 It's just that the restaurant is cutting up the stakes, the cutting up the beef and creating steaks and cooking it. You still have to worry about owning the land and making sure that your land is in the selection criteria. And your land is in the selection criteria by virtue of being in an index or being in a catalog or being in a market. Think of Google's index as a marketplace where buyers can find you and one of those buyers is no longer the middleman. It's the end producer. Right? So the direct the it's we're moving from a farm to table, a fork to table e exercise if you want. You still have to start with the farm. So if you're worrying about how you appear in in LLMs, you still have the same work to do and it'll take care of itself. And I think that's why our agency stopped worrying about LLM tracking and LLM reports because they're not very meaningful and it doesn't change the outcome. It doesn't change the input of the game. Right.
Yeah. I've got I got a follow through question about this. It's my follow through question. So I think the thing that people get a little bit confused or incorrect is that for large learning models they had to get a lot of material to learn from to digest and so they go out read loads of books that online they read it's been reported they've gone in and read stuff that was copyrighted or whatever. They enormous amount of data and people suggest that in a way being indexed.

27:04 What do you think about it? Do you think that Anthropic or open AI the digested the enormous amount of content and that's in their own semi-indexed?
No. So the there's two different things going on. The learning process is the LLMs have to learn language and the only way to learn language is through brute force giving them every single sentence.
Yeah. And then by knowing every single sentence, they can have a conversation, right? And by looking at every single sentence, they can work out what the next word is going to be. And by learn doing that, you can scale it from words to sentences to paragraphs to documents. That basic learning isn't contemporary information. It's
It could be taken from books from 100 years ago or books that went out of copyright or information from a year ago and it's not done in a real life situation because all of that data needs to be broken into sentences and then converted into tokens. So effectively an LL Google is an empty machine that constantly vacuums in new content and serves it up. An LLM first of all has to be trained into how to be an LLM. That's not learning about the contemporary goings on in the world right now. That's just vocabulary or that's the word I use, right? And it's not [clears throat] just English vocabulary. It's vocabulary in other words. It's understanding concepts and components to it. It's not a vast amount of information. It's a limited amount of information. It's probably less information than our human brain can store. It's a very fixed amount. It's more that they can only store the use of words. Whereas the information at large on the internet is the application of words to specific solutions, descriptions, observations, opinions, stories, historical ideas, new ideas, and new potential. That information is so vast, you can't possibly put it in an LLM. And so what the LLM does is it's the same as when we go to school and we read history books and geography, we're learning how to tie reference points together.

29:27 And then in daily discourse, a new problem comes in, which is effectively information, right? And then your brain decides based on how it's been taught to start breaking that problem down into concepts it can understand. And then your brain starts breaking it into tasks it can understand that you give to your co-workers. And that's how we solve problems. That's how the human antill works. And LLMs kind of work on the same way. They have a vocabulary. They go to school. They learn about the world of yesterday. And then we apply them to problems of right now. I need to write a blog post about the Boeing 737, right? And it knows what a Boeing is, and it knows what a Boeing 737 is. It can then ask for the latest information or the most comprehensive information on the Boeing 737 and then if you want to drill down into the manufacturing components, it can go to a search index, ask it for pages on that and then use those pages to synthesize an answer. And AEO go a SEO is just about putting making sure your page gets into the synthesized results rather than someone else's page. Yeah, I was being the devil advocate there because I was aware what you just outlined, but you did a fantastic job. The reason why I brought it up and it's a little bit off topic, but I do regularly hear this term that the learning large learning models they're going out they're indexing.

30:59 They have a small index and it up to now it's been very inefficient. As I said before, if you look at Bing Webmaster Tools and Google AI report and you look at the same pages being crawled and index crawled and crawled again, I have one site that gets 20 clicks a month, but it has 57,000 citations across nine pages. And those nine pages have been recalled 57,000 times. That's very inefficient for me. That's very inefficient for ChatGPT, Google, and Bing. Right? What they're starting to do is index those documents a bit better and open AAI has said it's starting a road map that in 5 years it will have its own bigger index and then there are also supplemental indexes like EXA and common crawl right but the highest quality index is the Google index and it's because of the Google PageRank nearest seed common crawl has something similar called I Helios I can't remember what it's called. It's a very similar system as nearest seed, right? And so as they're building these indexes instead of having to live fetch from Google which is very expensive also with Google being belligerent about it as they should be. It's their index.

32:19 They're only having to touch in and check in with Google every now and then. They don't have to check in with every search. They just have to check in once a week or once a month just to do a quality adjustment. But at the same time, it's instead of the top 3% of the web, it's the top 3 and 12% of the web. So they're just making a little bit easier, but they're only scratching the very surface

🚨 Indexing Issues & SEO Myths

32:46 Using GSC for indexing issues. Give us an outline here, David. Something I read about all the time, especially I think from web developers is they put a lot of emphasis on crawling and I think they think of crawling as a proxy for authority. So they think more crawling equals better indexing. You effectively have a set of technical impediments, right? So Google tries to go and fetch a page. Every crawler goes to try and fetch a page. It can either fetch the page or it can't, right? If it can't fetch a page, it's one of I think nine errors. It's blocked by robots which doesn't apply to meta, for example, and it doesn't seem to apply to Anthropic or Perplexity either. It's blocked by a server permission error. In other words, the server has been told that this file or this folder cannot be accessed by this user. The page has a no index tag on it. So, Google can crawl it, but it can't add it to its index. So, it can't move from crawl fetched to indexed. The page four or force. In other words, the service says, "I don't have this page." The page is redirected. In other words, the specific URL you're asking for is only available on this URL. So, Google can't index that URL and then you have soft versions of those. If a page can be fetched, it falls in it gets much easier from now on. It falls into one of three errors.

34:12 Crawled, not indexed, or indexed. And then after indexing it becomes a ranking issue. Where do I rank? Right? And I think people think that crawled not indexed is either is a technical error. It's not a technical error because you've had to pass through all of those other errors. Three, four, five, blocked by robots, blocked by no index, security code, whatever, or canonical or duplicate or redirected. Discovered and crawled not indexed are both authority issues except that discovered is also can become a bug where Google has a block on that particular URL right that particular reference number and the only way to overcome that is to make a slight edit to the slug so you just change the page's name right you either add an s or hyphen or something you effectively get a new primary key ID a new ID for the page and Google will crawl that but it won't crawl the other
We touched upon this last week didn't we? Because people are seeing a lot more of their pages crawled but not you know
Exactly a lot more but
Authority is becoming difficult.

35:28 There's the other argument isn't there that I'm going to put it again to you. I'm going to be a bit boring. The argument is, one of the arguments is that because of AI, it's much easier to produce content and there's just been a flood. I don't know if there's any clear evidence or it, but there's just a flood of new content that's people asking Google to index
And indexing costs Google money. So,
It's negligible.
It's negligible. So that's but there's a lot of people emphasizing that argument that it's costing Google a lot not negligible they say it's costing Google a lot of money to index all this and they just be yeah sorry go on I just thought
So yeah no I'm aware of the arguments there's a lot of people saying your content isn't good enough it's too thin it they break information gain into it they say it's AI content they say the Google didn't like the quality of content the Google Plex as a whole is about 19 exabytes. YouTube is about 20 it's 19 to 24 exabytes and YouTube is about 25 to 30 exabytes.

36:43 A 4K video, an hourong 4K video is the equivalent of hundreds of small websites, right? Text pages take up very little space. If you've got a hundred, if you've got a 100 words, that maybe is a kilobyte of space excluding the HTML and the CSS, which Google doesn't need to index, right? Compare that text content to a 4K video. Google can index millions and millions of pages with a thousand words. There is no limit on YouTube. YouTube is so cheap that people actually upload data into YouTube videos because it's so cheap. You can upload it and take it down again, right? You can upload gigabytes of data to YouTube for free. There's no limit. So saying that Google is running out of space. Now Google could make a statement like we don't want to indefinitely index a bunch of content we're not going to use. The idea of Google of there being more content than Google can serve has always existed. Again, the top three pages, if an index has a 100 million pages, that's 0.0 0.1% of all those pages is getting clicks. That problem has always been there. So, if another site wants to come along with 100 million pages and only get 10% of it index, that's that site's problem. If you want to break down the well, your content's too thin or your content's not good enough, it's really simple. Find someone else. Come to me on X or whatever. Give them that content and if they can index it, then it can't be any of those other issues.

38:26 It can't be a cost issue. It can't be a quality issue. It can't be a thin issue. It can't be an information gain issue. The problem is always solved through authority and getting authority to the pages. Yes. As a whole, Google is the value of authority is going down. As you get more pages, like if you print more dollars, the value of the dollar goes down.
I don't know what number four would be, but it's like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, isn't it? You got number one horseman is Schema. Then number two is Z. Now I think we can put this index story as number three horsemen of the box of the SEO apocates are
The worst the worst myths
And I don't know what number four of these four horsemen's going to be but I think we're up to number three in my mind. I just got that in my mind the four horsemen of the SEO apocalypse. But you know but you still you still see it everywhere don't you still see schema you still see EAT and this about indexing thing has also come up and is quite popular isn't it as a but I think
I saw someone I was talking about a survey that I wish it never happened that unfortunately happened and someone was saying oh but Google's not the only game said that schema it was a ranking factor and they were trying to say it's a ranking factor to AI. I think the fundamental reason we have myths is people trying to oversimplify everything and make everything seem easy to understand from their point of view and it just doesn't work that way. Google and Anthropic and Perplexity are not trying to make the world simple but not trying to design their systems to be easily understood by you. They're trying to make the outcome easily understood by you.

40:18 It's also this indexing thing. It's like linking two events and it makes sense but there's actually no data to support the actual looking for the right word again the actual you got
Yes you got two very extinct different events but they seem in some way linked but then
Whenever I debate people on this they always say but this makes sense or it must be this or how else would you and it's They're arguing for it to exist because it's easier for them to understand it. And if you find yourself arguing in that position, you've lost. You're lost in the woods, right? You're arguing because you want your system to be easily understood. And that's not my problem and that's not their problem.
So if we can get back to the indexing. So what you're saying is that bas and I thought your example YouTube was brilliant. So this idea that Google's running indexing some extra pages when they got
4K video so they don't work. So you mentioned it's authority. So you just got a load of new content and Google got to make some judgment about the relevance and a lot and because you got a lot more content it doesn't have enormous relevance to Google's indexing system would bas let's look at it another way I think when people are doing SEO for the first time they think that by entering the index they're entering the game and they become so hyperfocused on getting indexed
And they forget that getting indexed doesn't mean the same as ranking that just cuz you get in the index doesn't mean that more people are going to see your content and you're suddenly going to start ranking higher. What Google's trying to do is tie together if you have no authority you have no chance of ranking. So why would we include pages with zero authority? There's no need to.

42:21 You're not going to rank. So there's no point in going through the process of indexing you. And when you look at people talking about all these other things around it, they're the problem is that they're effectively pushing the solution further out of the hands of people that are trying to get indexed. It runs on authority and you have to come to terms with that. If you're a web developer and you want to make it about crawling and about architectural brilliance and perfect code, it's just not how it works. I'm sorry. If you're a brand person and you think it's about creating a brilliant brand, it's also not how it works. I'm sorry. It's about authority and it's non-negotiable. And so if you want to get indexed, you have to get authority to these pages. That huge index that Google has is a moat. In other words, the technical debt for Anthropic to catch up with them is 5 years. When I was in high school and I read The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and another book about how atoms were built, one of the things that I read is that for a ton of gold, sorry, for an ounce of gold to be extracted from the world's largest D gold mine in South Africa, you have to bring up a ton of dirt. It sounds highly inefficient.

43:37 Back in the 1980s, it was highly it was already inefficient. But that moat is what makes gold more valuable. Yeah,
You can see that. You can see that in diamonds, can't you? As soon as you could make artificial diamonds, [snorts]
The value of the whole market declines, isn't it?
The that massive index is Google's moat that adds value to their business. Radio, let's just finish off and then maybe you could share your screen and because we got we haven't had many questions but one of them was could you share the last question is segment brand versus non-brand traffic does Google search console do a good job of that

🏷️ Brand vs Non-Brand Traffic

44:24 I don't think so no
So basically I think a lot of people again coming from the point of view of marketing and brand marketing think that they that Google rewards brand efforts and I don't know if they say that because that's the only way they see the world or if they actually are smart enough to know that's the only way their audience sees the world but Google doesn't understand brands and so what it tries to do is it does a reax experiment in search console where it tries to look for your brand or variations of your brand and give you a brand report. The problem is it also showcases the second problem with search console which is how many search phrases aren't actually ever shared with you. And so if you've got a normal website 20% of your traffic is branded and you look at the number of total searches. So let's say you've got a total thousand searches and your branded is 24% that's two or 20% that's 200 brand searches. If you do the reverse of branded, you won't actually get the same number of search queries that makes up the delta between the two. And that shows how little traffic Google is sharing with you.
Just think we found our fourth horsemen of the SEO apocalypse. We got our four horsemen there. Schema, EAT, non-index, and branding there. The four horsemen of the apoc. Right. Have you got a screen to share us then Dave? It's really interesting. I think this is one of the major why people get so confused because between the between schema between I think the main thing is this consistent argument that Google knows something about quality and what we looking at then Dave. So, we're just looking at a basic content website that I use for testing the LLMs

🖥️ GSC Live Walkthrough

46:20 And I just put up different types of content like happy hour menus and things like that in my locality and I use it as a reference for telling people where to go when we meet visitors. And I wanted to show how if we look at this over 6 months, it looks like that there was a high period of impressions here, a high period of clicks here, and then a sort of like a flat event or plateau event space happening over here. And I want to show people how to start digging in using search console. So, what I'll do is I'll go to the compare tool and the default comparisons are the last 24 hours, which is very useful if you want to know if you've made changes yesterday and you want to know if overnight your pages are ranking better. You have the 7-day comparison and you compare 7 days year to year, 28 days. Again, this a butterfly comparison. And then 20 days year-over-year, 3 months, and then 6 months, which you can only do because again, search console only keeps 18 months of data. But I think what's more useful to do is because we've got this flat period here, comparing the last week isn't really going to tell us a lot of information. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this week down here from the 10th to the 15th, and I'm going to move months back to January.

47:47 And I'm going to pick the same date. And what we find is that the distance in data points increases massively. So the total number of impressions is 1/3. The total number of clicks is also 1/3. And so we can start to look at what pages have lost traffic. And we can see which pages have lost the most impressions. And it looks like I had an FAQ question about LLC's, for example, that had a lot of impressions and went down to zero. Or we have an evaluate e-commerce fraud prevention vendors. It looks like this was a an LLM query tool that was doing brand evaluations, which I think are rubbish. And then we have other blog posts that we wrote just to test how LLMs were reading traffic. And so we can start to pick in on let's say this post and we can see which queries performed well and which ones didn't. So we can see a lot of these queries perhaps we had very low click-through rates and they caused Google to drop us. So, our page was called questions LLC and Google had been matching us with things like types of corporations, different types of corporations, LLC types, but actually none of these really matched what was happening in the search queries that Google was pairing us with like kinds of corporations, types of corporations, types of LLC.

49:41 We don't see these queries in here. And so while initially Google might have thought we were related to them, when readers were reading it or as Google started to test the page for click-through rate, I don't think it it used to rank pretty high, right? It was 5.4 and it dropped it to 29.1 on average. And if we that's still a pretty broad place to look at average position. So what I'll do is I'll click on types of LLC because that lost the most. We were ranking in position 7.3 and that slowly came down and we eventually just stopped ranking. We were kicked out of the index completely. So here you can see what's happening. For quite a while Google kept the same query in the same position and then in April it started to drop it and then test it again and bring it up and then drop it and test it and each time it brings it up the click-through rate isn't getting very much better. We're only seeing 0% here, right? But Google will have its own data. And obviously on pages with more volume, there'll be better data. But and eventually they just decided for these particular queries, people aren't happy. No matter what position we put it in, and even if we drop it and then try it against another page, other pages are performing better.

51:04 And it looks like in the last 6 months they've got much more adept at testing faster and dropping pages faster. And so what I would do is I'd come back and I would take out this prompt and I would look at the types of queries that it's performed for and maybe had different positions on. And then I can use this graph here to look at queries with different positions. So, for example, greater than 16. And I would see that there are potentially other pages I could create that could work better. And I'll just zoom in to make it more visible. So, types of LLC business we actually ranked pretty well for and different types of LLC. And so what I might do is say this query actually had more impressions. Maybe I should restructure and rewrite my page and retarget. Instead of calling it questions LLC, I'd be better off publishing it as different types of LLC. And then in that I could get all my queries that contain the word LLC and I could say look these are the things that people want to know about.

52:28 And suddenly I can see that for LLC options, for example, I had an a higher than average click-through rate with a position of 12 and a half even though it's only there for 84 impressions. And I might say, you know what, because this only ranked for a short term, I'm going to go and create a different page called LLC options instead of a page called LLC question. And then I might, as I'm staying with the topic of types of LLC's, I might take some of these and build these as headers inside my page. That might then say when people arrive and they see the table of contents, they might say, "This is actually closer to what I was asking questions about." And so I can start to use that information to either create new posts

👋 Wrap Up & Q&A

53:23 Or adding it to my existing page.
I think we need to wrap up the podcast. I've got I got a couple questions. You've disappeared. You've disappeared. Actually, I need to
I stopped sharing screen if you want to go back.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
There we go. And let's get this out the way. And we're going to wrap we're going to wrap up the podcast of the show. You'll be able to watch the interview and the bonus content as I call it on David Quaid's YouTube channel. But David, let's wrap up the podcast part of the show. What's the best way for people to find out more about you, what you're up to?
Search for
Or the goat.
Yeah. But you can find both of us on X, right?
Yeah. Yeah. David's very active and very responsive on X and on LinkedIn as well. And like I say to watch all the content, go to David Quaid's YouTube channel. 3 2 1 My major question about what you were showing is it necessary to make new pages or can you take the existing page and what you're seeing in Google console you can change the slug the top the main H1 and some make it more relevant because
Absolutely
But where's where do you make the judgment about improveving moving or changing the existing page and when you should make new pages
That comes from practice, right?

54:56 That's a that's experience judgment call. Yeah,
That's what that is. But the other factor that still mystifies me a bit is when you got let's say half a dozen key subjects that really pulls in the majority of your traffic and you keep writing and writing don't you get duplication then that and I mean by duplication that a c somebody that's visiting your site goes from one page to the They read the con and they think to themselves,
Does that happen?
Pardon?
When does that ever happen?
You don't think they come to your website and they look at other pages.
You can go to Analytics or Microsoft Clarity. It's almost never happens.
They just read one page and they're off, they
Unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. But they're not going to go from WordPress page to WordPress page, right? Remember, your pages aren't in your navigation. And there's actually no way for them to go do that, right?
There's internal links.
Yeah. But you don't really have
If you've got if you've got five pages on WordPress, one for schools, one for colleges, one for universities, one for nonprofits, there's no interlinking between them, right?

56:14 No.
Inbound pages. So they come in on one page and then they can go to contact, pricing, plan, support, about that kind of thing.
Yeah. I see. We can. So, is there anything more you want to show or shall we wrap it up?
No, I think that's I think we've answered all of the Yeah. Questions,
Right? I think if you got any more questions, just like I say, David's very active on X, very active on LinkedIn. Or you can leave a comment on the David Quaid's YouTube channel and he'll get back to you or I will see you next week, folks. Bye.