Using data from Search Console to grow an e-commerce business

Many believe that Search Console can only be used to monitor organic rankings and is therefore typically used by just SEO specialists. But that could not be further from the truth. Here are just a few ways in which (existing) online businesses can use query data found in search console in order to accelerate growth:

Finding new products to add to your online range

You may be looking at Search Console and see certain keywords driving little or no clicks. But what if some of these keywords drive high volume of Impressions? Well, it means that there are two important actions for you to take:

1) Optimise existing pages to improve rankings and effectively get more clicks (often easier said than done, though you should definitely look into it given high volume of searches, i.e. impressions)

2) Add new products (and pages). If you are getting a lot of Impressions for a certain product, it does probably mean that there is demand for this particular product (or type of products), and so you should look into widening the range of those and similar products, and in effect create more product pages. By doing so, you are increasing your chances of appearing more often on Google, which will then likely lead to more visits.

What is great about using your own Search Console data in order to identify new high-demand products is that you are sizing the opportunity in the context of your particular business, and not based on the entire market. In other words, some other tools (e.g. Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner) can give you information about market-level demand, but in reality it is much more useful to know about products for which you actually stand a real chance of getting organic clicks from Google. And what better source of that information than your own search data.

Finding seasonal products to be better prepared for next season

If your business has been operating for long enough (let’s say a year), you could look at your historical query (or page) level data in Search Console in order to find high-demand (high Impressions) products or product categories for any past seasons. That will allow you to be better prepared for the next season, as you will want to ensure that you do have product pages for all the high-demand seasonal products published well ahead of start of the season, to allow for Google algorithms to pick those up in a timely manner. In fact, in addition to creating any new products, you might want to give a bit of refresh to the existing product pages as Google does like fresh content a lot.

Note that Search Console by default only keeps 16 months of history, and so it is worth making sure that you do have a solution in place which stores all of your Search Console data so you can use it for any analysis of seasonality and/or long term-trends.

Identifying new trends

Well established businesses with a solid amount of organic traffic, can use the SEO Impressions and Clicks data found in Search Console to spot any new/emerging trends. That could be particularly true for e-commerce businesses, and other businesses with a large number of pages. So if you do happen to have substantial amount of organic traffic on your website, then do make sure to keep an eye on your data in Search Console as it will help you to stay one (or two) steps ahead of the competition.

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