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Adding structured data to your website is a great way to describe your content to Google, making it easier to understand your pages. Once you’ve added it, you can monitor the performance of your rich results in Google Search Console. This tool gives you everything you need to make the most of your rich results.
Search Console helps implement your structured data
Google Search Console is an essential tool for every kind of website owner. Here you will find a series of tools that help you to improve your website in a technical sense, and to provide your visitors with better content. One way to do this is to give you insight into the technical implementation of your structured data enhancements and the performance of the rich results in the search results.
In this post we are not going to focus on the technical part. We are not going to explain how you can solve problems with your structured data enhancements. This time, on Google’s search results pages, we’ll examine how your rich results are doing.
What is the Search Appearance Report?
The Search Appearance report in Search Console shows all the kinds of rich results your content has earned. What’s more, it gives you information about how people died with it rich results, which helps you improve the content for the rich results.
The performance report looks at two things:
- Click: the number of clicks from a search on a search results page that ended up on your site.
- Impressions: how many times a user saw a mention of your search result. Each visit to the search results page counts as an impression, and your result does not have to be in sight to be counted. Of course, if your listing appears on the next page and the visitor does not get there, it will not count as an impression.
If you click on a kind of rich result in the Search Appearance section, you will get additional statistics like the CTR and the average position of your search results. You can do everything you normally do in Search Console and add even more filters to refine your data from this page. For example, you can only look at mobile usage or how visitors from specific countries interact with your content.
How to use the Performance Report for your rich results
As with all Search Console stuff, you can do a lot. But there is no solution for everyone who will work in every situation. If you want fundamental insights into your search performance, you can find it here. If you are going to run complex queries and will find data to power your dashboards, you can find it here as well.
Want to get an idea of how your rich results perform? Of course you can! The least you can do is check the Search Console regularly. Go to Performance> Search Results to open the report. Then you can find the Search Appearance reports in two ways: by adding a new filter from the top bar called Search Appearance, or by clicking on the Search Appearance tab below the graph.
Choose your rich result
Choosing option two gives you an excellent overview of all your rich results that Google has found. Remember that the report only shows the types of rich content that Google encountered on your site. For example, you will notice that all the questions indicated are marked FAQ structured data of the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks. However, if you’re sure you added a specific type but it does not appear here, it may be broken. Check the Enhancements section on the left side of the screen, select your enhancement and see if there are any errors.
It could also be that you have added things that Google does not award with a rich result. You will not find it here. Of course, it may be that Google will add specific rich results for this in the future, so it sometimes makes sense to add that structured data anyway. Just make sure your structured data is valid, so do not forget to include it in the Test with rich results or the scheme validator.
Google throws some more stuff in a bucket that does not contain the description, called Rich results. Short, that bucket will be gone as Google will increasingly add separate sections for each type of rich result. Note that Google has said that each type of rich results has slightly different behaviors, so it makes sense to split everything.
View a performance chart for rich results on questions
If you choose a specific rich result – the frequently asked questions in this case – you can start looking at the data a little more clearly. In the screenshot below you will see the overview data for this type of content over a period of three months. It’s about everyone the content in which you added valid structured data.
You see the total number of clicks, impressions, CTR and the average position of your FAQ. This way you get an idea of how this type of content is performing on your site, and you get a rough idea of how people are dealing with it.
Drill
Of course, it gets more interesting when you start drilling. In the screenshot below, we look at a specific page that displays strange behavior – something we can all see, right?
This page has a rich result with questions and questions that went from nothing to something to nothing. If you find something like this, it could be that Google’s behavior has changed for this type of result. It may no longer contain a rich result for that particular period or page.
We know that nowadays Google is stricter in giving rich results with questions, which may have something to do with it. Or are your questions often incomplete or do you result in an error report?
It could also be that your competitor set up a better FAQ page and stole your rich result. Search the FAQ on Google to see if this is the case. You’ll also notice if Google no longer asks frequently asked questions for that term. But if your competitor stole it, it means you need to improve yours – especially if it’s a page that means a lot to you and your business. Do not assume that you will get it back if you rest there on your laurels.
This is just a simple example of what you can find if you monitor your rich results in Google Search Console. With the help of this data, you can start improving your content to make your rich results perform even better. Of course, you can also use the data to target new ones!
Do more with your reports
Google Search Console is a cool tool that will help you gain insight quickly, but it will also suit the power user. For example, you can export your data to analyze it in Sheets of Excel or build a Data Studio dashboard. Comfortable with regex? Then you can perform complex queries that will help you get even more data based on your specific filters. Google has more information on how to do it.
As mentioned before, there is no single way to use Search Console – just remember to use it!
Check your rich results in Search Console
This post gives you a quick overview on how to use Google Search Console to track the performance of your rich results. Even if you use it to monitor only a few key posts, it will be worth its weight in gold. If you are more experienced, you can use the data to power the dashboards you have built in Google Data Studio. Whatever you do, do not sleep on this feature!
Read more: How to create a Google Search Console Dashboard »
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