Content Optimization and Expansion using Google Search Console data and SEOTesting.com

Written by Nick Swan. Updated on 21, December 2020

Improving content is a great way to get more organic traffic to pages that are already ranking.

Google likes pages that are refreshed and kept up to date. The data from Google Search Console can help you expand your content with new sections and questions people ask around the page’s topic. Google is basically giving you clues on what keywords and sections to include on a page!

At SEOTesting we’ve made it really easy to get access to a page’s data and the queries that page is ranking for from Google Search Console. We also scrape the HTML of the page so we can tell you how many times each query is used on a page. While taking every single query your page appears for and stuffing it into content is NOT what I would recommend, it is highly likely you will get some ideas for new headings and sections based on a page’s query data.

We aren’t working with hypothetical keywords your page ‘could’ rank for, or other keywords and topics another tool thinks might be related to your keyword, these are actual keywords Google already ranks this page for.

How to run a content optimization and expansion process

This is the process a lot of content based sites have undertaken with SEOTesting.com and have got really good results.

1, Open up the All Pages report in SEOTesting

2, Order the report by impressions

3, Start from the top down and click on the first url.

When you click on any url within SEOTesting you are taken to the Page Details view. This view has the ‘clicks per day’ for the url displayed, with toggles to also see impressions, click through rate, and average position.

PageDetails view in SEOTesting, use the queries here for content expansion

The 'page details' view in SEOTesting

4, Check to see if top queries are used in the Page Title and Meta Description

Below the graphs we have the current page title and meta description displayed.

This is so you can quickly check whether they could be improved with the inclusion of a high impressioned/clicked query. Including a keyword is a nice way of improving the click through rate from the search results.

5, Review the top queries and the page’s content

Now we can review the top queries and make sure they are used in one form or another on a page.

Rather than picking out an individual query and trying to stuff it into an existing sentence, I try to focus on queries that I can build out new sections of content on either the existing page or as new supporting pages that are internally linked.

It’s always worth checking the search intent behind a keyword as well - which you can easily do by clicking on the G icon next to it. You probably want to skip over keywords where the calculated search intent by Google is different to the type of content you are creating.

6, Finally when you’ve updated a page, remember to set up an SEO test within SEOTesting to measure the results from your effort.

Summary

This process of adding and optimizing content is particularly important for affiliate and ad based sites that rely on a lot of informational content and how-to guides. Keeping your content fresh and updated will show Google you care about it, and build out more useful articles for the queries your ideal site visitors are searching for.