Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that helps you understand how your website is performing in Google’s organic search results. Search Console can tell you if your site is being indexed, if you need to fix something technical, and show you what queries you’re showing up for. If you haven’t used it before, there’s an overview from Google here.
At Metric Labs, we use Google Analytics and Google Search Console for all our SEO clients. We also use those tools for our own site.
While checking out our website traffic, I noticed something unusual. We had a strangely high level of pageviews on our blog about Mitsuku. All the other stats made sense – the first few pages are how people get to know us and check out credentials, and the data blending blog had been linked to by another industry publication (humblebrag, but it is a very helpful blog).
Why Mitsuku? We have plenty of other, more practical chatbot pieces – what not to do with chatbots, a guide to conversation design, and how to grow leads with a chatbot. It was strange that this one little niche interest piece about a very old AI being the 7th most visited page this year.
So I decided to investigate. First thing – where was the traffic coming from? Analytics showed most of the traffic was organic.
“Wow,” I thought. Mitsuku has been around for 18 years, and it’s attracted a lot of attention as a long term AI project. She’s won the Loebner Prize and been featured in articles in the New York Times, The Wall St Journal, and Wired. How could little old Metric Labs be ranking in organic results among such giants?
I fired up Google Search Console to investigate. If you haven’t connected your site to GSC yet, instructions can be found here. We can see the spike in organic traffic on our performance dashboard – the teal line is impressions, and the blue line is clicks.
“What fun,” I thought, “People are seeing us, they’re really seeing us!” I clicked the page for the Mitsuku blog entry to see what queries we were ranking for:
I was but a babe in the SEO woods. A sweet naïf who had forgotten the primal laws of the internet. Our searchers were not looking for intellectual inspiration re: artificial intelligence. Their queries were as follows:
Just like that, with one brutal analytical insight, my brief shining happiness was over.
I hope the instructions in this blog will help you learn more about your own organic presence.
As for us, we won’t be including “18” in any of our blog headlines going forward.
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