Overview
The Query Google Search Console action allows you to retrieve valuable search engine optimization (SEO) data from Google Search Console for a specific website URL. This includes metrics like clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position for the pages and queries that drive traffic to your site. It's an incredibly useful tool for monitoring and optimizing your website's search performance over different time periods. To use this action, you first need to connect your Google Search Console account. Then you can specify the website URL, date range, and dimensions like page or query to analyze. This makes it easy to track SEO changes over time and identify top performing pages and queries - essential data for any marketing or SEO workflow.
Usage Examples
Tracking Changes For Content Refreshes - By selecting different date ranges like the prior 30 days vs last 30 days, you can track changes to metrics month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or half-year-over-half-year.
Identifying Low Hanging Fruit - You can identify keywords that your URLs are unintentionally ranking for. These keywords are typically low hanging fruit for new content/articles.
Inputs
URL - The specific website URL you want to check in Google Search Console.
Date Range - The range of dates for which you want to run the query in Google Search Console.
Dimension to search by - The specific dimension (e.g. URL or query) on your website that you want to pull search analytics data for.
Dimension to pull - Allows you to specify the dimension to return (e.g. if you want to see what search queries a specific URL is ranking for or if you want to see the data for just a specific url)
Row Limit - Number of rows to return
Outputs
The Google Search Console action outputs various metrics and data points related to a specified URL and date range from your Google Search Console account. The main outputs include:
Key: This is the dimension that was returned. It will typically be a URL or a search query.
Clicks: The number of clicks your website received from Google Search results for the given URL and date range.
Impressions: The number of times your website appeared in Google Search results for the given URL and date range.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks to your website.
Position: The average position of the URL in Google Search results for the specified date range. A lower number indicates a higher ranking.
Troubleshooting
Connecting to Google Search Console - To use this action, you need to connect to your Google Search Console account and go through an authentication process. This allows the action to access your Search Console data.
Selecting URL - In Google Search Console, you can monitor multiple URLs. When using this action, you need to select the specific URL you want to analyze and get data for.
Selecting Date Range - The action allows you to specify a date range for the data you want to retrieve. You can choose from preset ranges like last 7 days, last 30 days, up to last 16 months. Interestingly, you can also select the "prior 7 days" which refers to the 7 days before the last 7 days. This enables you to compare metrics across different time periods.
Using Dimensions - Google Search Console provides data across multiple dimensions like country, device, query (search terms), search appearance, and page (URL). The two most relevant dimensions for this action are query and page.
Pulling Specific Dimensions - For a given URL, you can pull data for the page dimension to get metrics for that specific page. Alternatively, you can pull the query dimension to see the top search queries that drove traffic to that page.
Running and Testing Queries - Once you have configured the parameters, you can run the query. The output will include metrics like clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position for the specified URL and dimension. These output fields can then be referenced and used in subsequent steps of your workflow.
Limiting Query Results - For the query dimension, you can limit the number of top queries returned by setting a row limit (e.g. top 3 queries).