Google search console is another free tool provided by Google to help you improve your SEO and rank for more keywords relevant to your practice. 

How to use Google Search Console for Keyword Research 

Your Search Console dashboard can help you with SEO in a number of ways. Today, we will focus on keyword research and how search console can help you optimize your existing articles to drive more traffic to your website and more patients to your practice. 

How to See What Your Website Already Ranks for In Google 

When you log into your Search Console account, select “Performance” from the top left of the sidebar menu. On the performance page, you will see a list of search terms where your site is already appearing in Google searches. You can sort these results by clicks, impressions, or position. 

Clicks: This is the number of times your link has been clicked after someone searched this specific term in Google.  

Impressions: The number of times your website has been seen by users searching this specific term, whether they clicked your link or not. 

Position: Where your website appears on average in search of this. Most Google searches have about ten results per page. This means that an 11 under “position” would mean that you typically show up at the top of page two for that particular search while a one would mean that you are the first result in Google when a user types in this specific search term. 

Finding Specific Keywords

At the very top of the Performance page, you will see Search Type, Date, and +New. When you select “new,” then click “query” from the drop-down menu. This will load a popup where you can type in specific queries or search terms that you’d like to investigate further. For example, you could type in “back pain” to see terms related to “back pain,” where your site already has ranked in google.

Improving Your Articles with Search Terms from Google Search Console 

Now that you know how to locate the search terms that people use to find your practice in Google, it’s time to improve your ranking and move up in search results for relevant keywords. You can do this by taking the following steps: 

•  Add the exact keyword phrase somewhere in the article if it is not there already.

• Update your meta description to include the specific keyword phrase you have selected. 

• See if there are other related questions people ask about the topic that you could add to your article so that it comprehensively covers what a reader would like to know about the topic.  

Resubmit Your Post to Google for Crawling 

After you make SEO improvements in your article, it is important to submit the URL to Google for re-crawling. This will ensure that Google takes notice of your changes and can help your ranking improve faster. Do this by returning to Google Search Console and entering the article URL in the “inspect” area at the top of the page. When you do this, you will be given the option to “request indexing.”  Click that button and stay on the page until the popup tells you that your URL has been submitted to be re-crawled. This can take up to two minutes. 

If you would like a professional SEO and marketing team to improve your keyword rankings for you, email us about managing the SEO and marketing strategy for your healthcare business.