@tjrobertson52

If you care about getting traffic to your website from Google, there's only one data source that actually provides reliable data and it's completely free. I wanna talk about how to use it and some big changes for seeing recently. I'm referring to Google Search Console.

If you don't already have this set up for your domain, do it today. You won't start collecting data until it's set up. Just Google.

Google Search Console. It's very easy to set up. This is the only way to see what people are actually typing in Google before seeing your website and which page they're clicking on after that search.

Google Analytics can't show you that. Rank trackers like hrefs or Semrush can't show you that. I've been doing SEO for 17 years.

This is the most valuable data, the only reliable data you can. If you aren't using this data to do SEO, I don't think you're really doing SEO. The key to making the best use of this data is to know what pages and queries to filter out.

Fortunately, Google just released some AI filtering that makes this much easier. For example, you might want to filter out all branded traffic. It's not that branded traffic isn't valuable, it's just that it doesn't have anything to do with SEO.

You should be ranking No. 1 for your own brand terms no matter what you're doing on the SEO side. So when you're trying to evaluate the performance and opportunities in SEO.

It's helpful to filter out that traffic. But I wanna talk about some big changes we're seeing since Google introduced AI overviews in AI mode. Changes that are gonna multiply once Google replaces their main search results page with an AI response.

For nearly every website right now, clicks are going down and impressions are going up. If you don't know, an impression means your website showed up in the search results whether or not someone clicked on it. Historically, we haven't really cared much about impressions.

All we cared about was traffic to your website. But of course, the reason impressions are going up is because Google is showing AI responses. A lot of people are getting the answer they need in that AI response and they don't need to click on a website.

But if you sell an actual product or service, this isn't a bad thing. Fewer people are visiting websites, that's true, but more and more people are using Google to make purchase decisions. As long as that AI response is recommending your product or service, that's typically even better than a visit to your website.

So while I used to pretty much ignore impressions in Google Search Console, I now value them about equally with clicks and in the near future, I imagine we'll care even more about impressions than we do about clicks.