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This episode is sponsored by Calibrate iq. First, a disclaimer. In the interest of being transparent, I created Calibrate iq. It's my app and I built it because I wasn't satisfied with any of the other risk tolerance tools on the market. I found that other tools didn't work the way I wanted them to. They focus too much on risk preference rather than time horizon. They're clunky and overcomplicated and they're too expensive for what they do. And they aren't user friendly for clients. I designed Calibrate IQ to be simple, easy to use and low cost. It lets you send a single magic link to any client you want to survey. Clients fill out a simple survey that takes less than two minutes. Once that's done, you can automatically generate an investment policy statement instantly and deliver a beautiful branded report to the client. It lets you customize reports with your logo and brand colors, and you can even add your own custom investment preferences to the questionnaire. If you're tired of expensive risk tolerance tools that overthink the process, try CalibrateIQ. It's $9 a month with a seven day free trial. Give it a try at CalibrateIQ app again. That's CalibrateIQ app. Hey everyone. Welcome to Ops and Impact where we discuss operations and marketing for independent financial advisors building a lifestyle practice. I'm your host Michael Reynolds and today we're going to talk about how to use Google Search Console to track your RIA's marketing metrics. This came up as a great discussion in my opinion because I was working with a member of my Ops and Impact community this week during one of our Mastermind clinics, which is like an office hours where we jump in and just talk about whatever you want and I provide any kind of support I can or help with any issues related to operations and marketing. And I had just gotten through a a project helping this member build a new website on Claude code, which is a whole different discussion. We'll talk about that a different time. But his website was up and running, looking great, really happy with it, and the next question he asked was, hey, how do I start tracking metrics and how do I figure out the effectiveness of my marketing and see what's going on? And we talked about a few things. We got Google Analytics set up. It was actually already set up. We just had to link it up the right way. And then I helped him set up Google Google Search Console and make sure that was activated and working properly. And then I gave him some, just some Tips on how to interpret it, how to use it, how to read it, to get some information and metrics about how his website was performing from a search standpoint. And so I'm going to share that with you. I'm going to share with you how I use Search Console. Just a basic level of how it's useful, I think, to track certain metrics and just how to make sure it's effective for you and working properly. Google Search Console is a tool from Google that tracks certain metrics about your website and your search activity. Back in the day, many years ago, it used to be called Google Webmaster Tools and they renamed it a while back to Google Search Console. So if you're, if you're my age and remember it being called Webmaster Tools, that's what it used to be. It's called Search Console. You can Google the word Search Console and you'll find it. And the first thing you want to do if you don't have it set up is to activate it. So you activate this by signing up. And I recommend using your business email account to sign up so it's matched to your ra, your advisory firm's business anyway and set up an account and it's going to ask you to verify it. You can use various methods like a domain record or a file on your server. It'll guide you through it. If you get stuck, reach out and I can help you. But basically get it activated and linked to your website. Once you get it linked to your website, you wait usually a few hours, maybe a day, and it will start gathering data now. Side note, there is a new feature in Google Search Console. It's getting rolled out slowly, so you may not see this yet. But you can also add additional properties. A property is like a thing you're tracking. For example, your website is a property, but you can also add social media properties to track. This is brand new. So for example, you can add your YouTube channel, your X account, your TikTok account, your Instagram account, and Google Search Console will also track metrics on those accounts as well. So that's brand new. If you don't see it yet, wait a little bit, it'll probably be an option soon. But at the very least, your website is the default thing you want to link up to Search Console. So you link up your advisory firm's website using the domain name and it starts gathering data. I would give it a few days at least to maybe a week to actually see something real. But then over time you start to get more useful data. So I'm looking at mine back to years ago and it's giving me plenty of time to, to look at trends over long periods of time. And here is how I use it primarily. So the primary use case for me with Google Search Console is to see how my traffic and impressions are performing as a trend over time. So when you're logged into Search Console on the left hand side you will see something called Search Results under Performance. So there's a little performance tab and then underneath that is a search results sub tab. If you click that, you're going to see a graph and you can sort this or set a range for this graph to be a certain time range, three months, a full year, whatever you want. And that's useful because you can see how your impressions and your clicks are performing over time. So what's the difference between impressions and clicks? Impressions, which is going to be in the purple area. Purple is the, the color used for impressions. So it's going to be either the line graph or at the top you're going to see a box called Total Impressions. So that purple area is impressions. Impressions is when your website shows up in a search result that is an impression. So impressions are good. We want to be seen and served up in search results. The first step to getting found, the blue line and the blue box next to it is clicks. Clicks is when someone actually clicks that impression and goes to your website as a result. So clicks can also be thought of as just traffic to your website, just general traffic. So one thing that I do every single time when I'm reviewing metrics for either my own website or an advisor I'm working with is to check the trend. So in theory we want the trend to be going up. We want to see that our marketing activities are leading to more impressions and more traffic. So if traffic and impressions are going up, that means that the work we're doing, the content we're producing, the efforts we're putting into marketing are adding value. They're continuing to improve and grow that exposure. So that's what we want. So ideally that's what we want to see. Now there's lots of reasons why this could change or bounce around or go up and down. And so I'm not going to get into all that, but I'm just looking at just raw data you can interpret and read. And so one thing I really like to do is do a comparison to see how we're doing. So if you're logged into Search Console this is obviously hard to do as an audio only format, but let's say you're logged into Search Console. There is a little section at the top of those boxes called more. It's like a more section. So if you click more and drop it down, it will let you compare. So if you click on the Compare sub tab, you can compare, for example, the last three months to the previous three months or the last six months to the previous six months, or even a custom range. And that's going to tell you how you're performing as a comparison to the previous period. So if I Click Compare last 3 months to previous period, it's going to compare the last three months to the three months before that last three months. And so it's going to tell me in comparison how I'm doing as a trend. So when you look at total impressions, you're going to see last three months and then previous three months. And ideally you want the last three months to be higher than the previous three months because that's telling you that your impressions went up across those two periods. Same thing for clicks. You want to see that your clicks went up, if possible, because that tells you that your traffic is improving and increasing. So that's the direction you want to see it going. I wouldn't be too alarmed if it sometimes goes down a little bit. These things can be cyclical. Sometimes your traffic can go up and down. That happens. But in general, you want to see a trend of impressions and traffic going up. So that's how I use Search Console, just to get a nice barometer of what the trend looks like for my impressions and clicks. So if it's going up, your efforts are paying off. They're doing what they're supposed to do. You are seeing a good trend. If it's going down consistently, that tells you there's something else going on. You may have issues with your website. Maybe you dropped off some marketing efforts, maybe there's some technical issues on your site. Maybe the content you're creating is not resonating anymore. Lots of things could happen there. That's a whole different can of worms to not dig into right now. But that could be something to look into. All right, so that's kind of the basics. If you look below that search results area, you're also going to see more information. You're going to see search terms that led to impressions and or clicks to your website. So this is good information because you're able to see what terms are leading to the most traffic and what people are finding your site based on. And again, you can look at this in the different time periods, like three months or whole year or whatever you want to look at. And you'll be able to see very clearly what search terms are resonating. So you can see maybe they're searching for your firm name, maybe they're searching for your name specifically, maybe they're searching for topics that you write blog posts on. Maybe they're searching for things like fee only, fiduciary, financial advisor or whatever you're trying to rank for. So you'll be able to see those search results and get a barometer of how those different search terms are leading to your website. So that's a good useful piece of the dashboard to look at as well. Something else I like to look at are just issues, errors, insights. There's different areas where you can look at to see if there are any problems with your website. So one place I like to look for issues is the Pages section under the Indexing tab on the left. So on the left hand side you'll see a section called Indexing. And then if you click on Pages you'll see a dashboard showing you information on page indexing. So indexing means has the page been picked up by Google Search Crawler? Basically. Now I want to caveat this by saying don't be too alarmed because you're always going to find errors here. Google Search Console is not the end all be all. Every error is not important. But at a high level it will tell you what pages are being indexed and what pages are not being indexed. And so if you scroll down a bit more, you'll see why certain pages aren't being indexed. It could be various reasons. If you filter by just that section, you're going to see things like redirect issues or canonical issues or 404 not found errors. Some pages have been crawled but not indexed yet, so they're pending. Some things could be excluded by certain tags. All sorts of issues you could see there. Some of them are not super relevant. Some of them are. So again, going into the why behind this stuff is not in the scope of this episode today. It would take too long. Certain things you want to watch out for any kind of failed redirects could be a technical issue, 404 not found pages, maybe you need to put a redirect on those. So basically, if you're not sure what all this means, talk to an expert or your web developer or someone to kind of help with this. So that's a good, a good section to look at in Search Console. Another section you can look at is the Insights section This is near the top left. So if you click on Insights, you'll be able to see just kind of some general trends on a summarized, kind of simplified view of all the stuff we've talked about. So you'll be able to see it defaults to the last 28 days, I think. And you'll see how your clicks and impressions have gone. And then you'll see top content, content that is most trafficked content that is the most popular. You'll see trending content that's trending up. You can also filter by content that's trending down. So in particular, if you see content trending down, that could be a good indication that maybe you need to rework those blog posts, maybe rewrite them to be more relevant and current, maybe expand on them, make them more, I guess just more relevant and more more information. Or maybe update them to be more up to date in terms of specific information so that content section can give you some insights. Also you'll see queries leading to your site, kind of the top queries leading to your site. Again, query queries trending up, queries trending down. And then below that you'll see countries leading to your site and branded versus non branded. So just a nice little dashboard to show you basic information about what's happening. Another section I like is the links section. On the left hand side near the bottom you'll see a link called Links. So click on that and you'll be able to see inbound links to your site. So for example, you'll see which pages have the most links to them. On my particular search console, the homepage seems to get the most links and then my podcast is second. And then individual articles start to show up as the most linked to content on my site. So that's interesting to see because you might get a sense of how much your content's being linked as an indication of how popular it is. So if people reference that a lot, either in social posts or articles of their own, or external sites, that could be interesting to see because that is pretty popular content. Also, internal linking is good to see as well. So this is sites, or I'm sorry, pages inside your site that are linking to each other, you want to have a pretty high number of those to show relevance between pages on your site. And then below that you'll see top linking sites. So you'll see sites that link to your website. So you want those to be pretty relevant high value sites. If you see a lot of spammy sites or low value sites, I would work on that, that could be an issue to address. But for example, my top linking sites are policygenius because I used to write for them. LinkedIn, Wealth Tender, flatfeeadvisors.org, xY Planning Network. These are all highly relevant authoritative sites. I like getting links from all these sites. So that's good. We like to see that. And then below that top linking text. So what text is linking from the site to your site? That's not as important. The rest is pretty, pretty interesting though. So again, what would you do with this information if you have a lot of authoritative sites linking to yours? I'd say that's a thumbs up. Things are going the right direction. You've got good authoritative links. If you have a lot of maybe no links at all, or very few links or sites that aren't relevant, I would want to replace those by trying to make an effort to get better inbound links to have those authoritative sites being the ones linked to you most often. Another thing to check sitemaps. This is very simple, but you want to make sure you have a sitemap on your website to serve up to Google Search Console and Search Crawler. So if you click on Sitemaps on the left under indexing, you should see if all is correct. You should see a submitted sitemap section with a status of success and a number of discovered pages there. That should be what shows up there. If you don't see anything there like that, then you want to add your sitemap to Google Search Console to make sure it knows where to find it. And a sitemap is simply just a sitemap XML file that lives on your site and indexes everything and kind of serves up a structure to Google Search Console that helps it index and crawl your site properly. Yet another section that's useful is Core Web Vitals. On the left under Experience, you'll see Core Web Vitals. And that shows you mainly speed your website pages. So if you look at this section, you'll see both mobile and desktop. And if you look at the report, you'll be able to see how your site is performing from a speed standpoint. And so if you see 85, for example, I see 85 good URLs. That means that all my pages pretty much are good. I see zero poor URLs and zero URLs needing improvement. So that means that my site is performing well. No issues from a technical standpoint or a speed standpoint. All right, we've gone through a lot. I'm going to stop There, because that's probably enough for today. Might be overwhelming already, but keep in mind, as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, if you see the option to add additional properties and it shows the option to add social profiles, you could also do that as well. And when you do that, you'll get similar information for those social profiles as well. So for example, I'm looking at my YouTube property, which is my YouTube channel, and I see things like clicks, traffic sources, trending content, very similar information to what I would see on the website, but specifically for my YouTube channel. So take a look at that. If you're doing videos on YouTube or podcasting, or you've got Instagram content or X content, even TikTok, you can add those properties and get similar information and start to watch those trends and see how your content is performing. So again, I'll stop there. I don't want to be overwhelming, but that's a good round of basic information that you can get from Google Search Console. And again, a lot of advisors are asking, hey, how do I measure what's going on? How do I see if my content's working? How do I see what's going on and what's working? Well, Search Console gives you a lot of good information that can help answer those questions. It can tell you exactly how your content is performing, what issues there might be if things are trending in the right direction, and some structural feedback as well. So if you don't have Search Console installed, I recommend getting it set up and using it to start to get some some useful information like this. All right. Whew, that was technical. Thanks for sticking with me. If you have any questions, my consulting site for advisors is michaelreynolds.com you can find me there. You can book a consultation online if you want some one on one support, or if you want to have more of an ongoing kind of support system, feel free to join my Ops and Impact community. It is $29 a month with a 30 day free trial, no credit card required. If you want to just test it out with no obligation. And we do a lot of fun stuff in there like weekly mastermind clinics which are like office hours and other content is available as well, including monthly blog posts and social media content that is white labeled for you to use, free for you to use anywhere you want, your own website, your own blog, your own social properties. So if you have zero interest or time to do blogging or social media, this will give you at least a monthly article to use and a basic pack of social media content to use throughout the month as well. So that's part of the community. Among other stuff, too. So with that, thanks for joining me today. Have a great day. See you next time.