Google Search Console and Keyword Discovery
Google Search Console provides website owners with data on search impressions and click-through rates for specific queries. This tool requires domain verification, meaning creators on "rented" addresses cannot access this data. Utilizing these analytics allows podcasters to discover the actual search intent behind their traffic, such as listeners finding an episode through specific niche questions rather than the intended topic.
google search console· analytics· search intent· keywords· impressions
09:46 Google Search Console. It's Google's free tool for website owners. It shows you which searches your pages turned up for, how often they appeared. appeared, and how often someone actually clicked. Page by page, so episode by episode. And I can't just have that anyway? Not for an address you don't own. Google makes you prove you control a domain before it'll show you anything. You can't verify podherd.com or spotify.com. On a rented address, the numbers exist, they're just not yours to look at. That's quite galling, actually. From Grow the Herd Up, PodHerd has a Google Search Console integration that shows the clicks and impressions for your episode pages.
10:28 For the actual searches behind them, you open Search Console itself. Right. Now that is interesting. Is it? Say you've got a running show. You might find an episode you thought was about marathon training turning up week after week for why do my knees hurt going downhill because you spent four minutes on it in the middle. So you'd know what the episode's really about. To strangers, anyway. And maybe that's what you call the next one. But you didn't blink at the authority stuff. Because that's all slow and theoretical. Credit builds, links compound, trust me, come back in five years.
11:06 This is different. It tells me roughly what people typed before they landed on an episode, and whether anyone's finding the show through search at all. That's what would tell me if the rest of it is worth bothering with. Tom, are you conceding? No, I'm saying one specific thing is more interesting than I expected. That's what conceding sounds like. Curious isn't converted. Fine, I'll take it. And I'd want to see what it actually says before I believed anything else you've told me today. Which is the right instinct. For a lot of shows, early on it'll say not much yet. That's still worth knowing. All of that's the long game, though. Domains take years.