How to connect Search Console and win more clicks

About half of what Rankbench looks for comes from your own click and impression data, and until Search Console is connected those findings don't exist. This guide connects it, checks the one setting that most often goes wrong, and turns what comes back into three changes.

Step 1: Connect

1. Press Connect Google Search Console. It's on the Search tab, the overview and your dashboard.
2. Sign in to Google and pick the site to share. Rankbench reads performance data only.

Step 2: Check the property

Google can hold several properties for what you think of as one site: a domain property, a www version, a bare https version, sometimes an old http one. They don't hold the same data, and the wrong one looks exactly like a site with no traffic.

Rankbench picks the property that reported the most clicks last month and tells you so. Check it anyway: the connection panel at the bottom of the Search tab names the property in use, with change site beside it.

The first sync reads up to sixteen months of history. After that it syncs overnight.

Step 3: Rewrite a page that ranks but doesn't get clicked

1. On the Search tab, find Where your traffic is stuck.
2. Pick the search with the most impressions.
3. Look at your title as it appears in results. The usual problems: your company name comes first, it's cut off before the useful part, or it answers a different question.
4. Rewrite it with the searched phrase near the front, and publish.

Give it two weeks. Google has to re-crawl the page and the click rate has to build up.

Step 4: Work out why a page lost ground

Find Pages losing ground and compare the ranking change with the click change.

1. If the page fell several positions, something outranked it. The fix is content or links.
2. If it held its position and still lost clicks, the fix is the title and description.

Step 5: Hand a competitor gap to the calendar

1. Open the Competitors tab and find searches your comparison set ranks for and you don't.
2. Pick one you could genuinely write well. Several rows usually collapse into one good article.
3. In the content calendar, press Refresh topics and type it in as a topic you want written.

Step 6: Check back in two weeks

Look at What moved this month and Pages that gained on the Search tab, then run an audit and read Since your last audit.

If the rewritten page gained clicks without moving position, the title worked. If nothing moved, the title wasn't the problem and the page needs ranking work instead. Either way you have an answer.

What to do next

• The Search tab, for every panel this guide skipped
• Competitors, for the rest of the gap analysis
• How to plan and publish a month of content