What are the best ways to measure content performance with Google Search Console?

Tracking your content's success with Google Search Console involves monitoring key metrics like clicks (user visits), impressions (appearances in searches), CTR (engagement ratio), average position (ranking), pages indexed (Google's count of your pages), and search queries (terms leading to your site). Utilize date ranges and filters to refine data, submit XML sitemaps for efficient indexing, and address crawl errors promptly for enhanced visibility. Regularly analyze these metrics to optimize content strategy for improved performance.

- Create a Google Search Console (GSC) account. - Add your website property to GSC. - Verify ownership through recommended methods like HTML tag, domain name provider, or Google Analytics. - Use the HTML tag option by copying and pasting the provided code into your website's HTML. - Ensure successful verification by checking the ownership status in GSC.

Measure content performance with Google Search Console using key features. The Search Analytics report provides insights into clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. The URL Inspection tool offers details on indexing and crawling. Monitor the Coverage report for indexing issues, assess mobile usability with the Mobile Usability report, and address loading performance using the Core Web Vitals and Page Experience reports. Identify top-performing pages, analyze query performance, and optimize titles and meta descriptions for improved click-through rates. Submit and monitor XML sitemaps, and address security issues through the Security Issues report. Leverage these tools regularly to optimize content.

To optimize content performance through Google Search Console, leverage key features for a comprehensive strategy. Delve into Performance Reports to assess clicks and impressions, gaining insights into user engagement. Utilize URL Inspection to scrutinize indexing and crawl status, ensuring seamless integration into search results. Promptly identify and resolve issues with the Coverage Report, maintaining optimal visibility. Evaluate the user experience through Core Web Vitals, focusing on loading, interactivity, and visual stability. Confirm mobile-friendliness using the Mobile Usability Report. Lastly, submit and monitor XML sitemaps to facilitate efficient indexing.

As Google Search Console offers multiple methods to setup the account. The best method I will always take is setting up with DNS method. This allows me to add all 4 types domain or url of the websites. It offers more insights then other method. I can inspect every type url with inspector tool from GSC.

Impressions are my favorite metric in this report because they measure visibility within the result pages. This can be helpful not only for increasing traffic but also for branding. Impressions also can help diagnose problems as they are more sensitive to changes that can occur after an update.

In addition to what Joe Hall said, I love discover and refresh reports. These help us to understand how Google looks at our websites and our content. Does Google know what we update the most often and where we publish new content, and how often does it assume we make changes or add to our domain. By knowing this we can fix or enhance site structure, quality of content and pages, as well as set better priorities.

Use performance report, this section gives wide range of options to check your pages, queries, rankings and more! You can test set of pages or exact page Easy platform and straightforward!

From the performance report we also have the ability to unveil user intent, allowing a deep dive into the why behind the clicks and identifying untapped keywords ensuring content aligns with user expectations. It’s a powerful tool to shape strategies that resonate with the your audience.

The Coverage Report also shows you the Source of the errors (e.g.: Website or Google Systems) which helps to see if it is an error that you can actively engage with or not.

In my experience If there are numerous pages not indexed, it signals a potential problem in content accessibility or Google’s evaluation of your content. Regular checking the coverage report helps troubleshoot and optimize your site for better performance.

If you want to measure content performance, I would not focus on the Core Web Vitals (CWV) report. While the CWV report is useful, it is more relevant for sitewide improvements. It is more related to frontend code than content.

The CWV report doens't show you all pages. So I would rather use it to get a "feeling" or an overview, but it really isn't helpful when trying to solve problems.

In most industries and for most websites, external links (backlinks) should not be how you measure your content performance. Better focus on the performance report (clicks, position, CTR) to measure content performance.

The Links report is great for an overview, but focusing on link quality is crucial. It's not just about quantity; relevance and authority matter. Ensure your links are from reputable sources to boost site authority and SEO.

For eCommerce websites, the enhancements report is extremely useful in measuring content performance, specifically because of the product structured data that is included on the site. It's critical to monitor these alerts and identify any errors with structured data that could hurt the page's ability to be shown as a rich result

Google Search Console (GSC) should not be your only tool when evaluating content performance. Web analytics (like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Piwik) give relevant metrics like bounce rate or time on site that are missing from GSC.

Data privacy settings in Google Search Console can prevent filtered data from matching the totals displayed. A common example of this is in segmenting branded and nonbranded queries, where their aggregation doesn't match the overall total displayed.

You should also keep in mind that you will never get "live" data in the GSC, since there is always a delay of some days. And that you will only be able to measure the performance when an URL get's the first traffic. So you will always only be able to react rather than act.