A recent study by ZipTie has revealed a significant flaw with Google Search Console (GSC), a free online tool widely used among search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals and business owners to track site traffic.
The study found that GSC only tracks around 50% of search queries that are effective in driving traffic to a website. This is because GSC does not track natural language queries, which are increasingly preferred by people communicating via voice assistants or artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.
Co-founder of ZipTie, Tomasz Rudzki, conducted a test that proved Search Console consistently neglects conversational search queries. These are natural language questions that people ask when talking with voice assistants, such as Alexa, or AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
As part of this test, Rudzki used Google to search the same conversational query over several days, using different devices and accounts. Each of these searches directed traffic to his site. Even validating the traffic using other analytics tools, these same searches were not showing up in Search Console reports.
To make sure that this error wasn’t exclusive to just his website, Rudzki asked 10 other SEO professionals to conduct the same test. Each of these tests resulted in the same outcome.
According to the study, Google Search Console requires a minimum search volume before it can begin tracking queries. For a search query to appear in reports, it must receive a specific number of searches. Unfortunately, this specific number remains unknown at this stage.
Unexpectedly, AI Overviews appear in Googles results page for 80% of conversation searches; however, it does not show them in GSC, a vital instrument for marketers and SEO professionals.
This difference deprives business owners of the complete picture, making strategic decisions even more complicated.
Content specialists may be publishing articles based on the data provided by keyword research tools instead of utilising genuine questions that are being asked by users. Similarly, SEO specialists are missing the opportunity to optimise for the conversational searches that are going unreported.
To address this shift, website owners must understand that Google Search Console doesn’t show the full story, and reporting strategies should be adjusted because of this.
Rather than looking at the search terms that people are using to find your site, instead, navigate to the Pages tab. This helps you understand which pages on your site are successful in bringing in the most visitors, regardless of the keywords.
As more people are using voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, and AI tools are encouraging users to ask more conversational search queries, the gap between how people are conducting searches and how reporting tools are tracking those searches is growing.
Understanding this change and adapting your approach can help improve the overall visibility and performance of your site.
Need some advice on how to read the data in your Google Search Console performance reports? Reach out to the friendly team of experts at Engage Web today.
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