Content tuning at scale with the Search Console API
This article explains how to use the GSC API to find content tuning opportunities.
Last week, I wrote about content tuning, the concept of making ongoing changes to the content to rank higher and for more keywords. I showed a very manual process of content tuning but mentioned that I would show a more scalable way with the GSC API if people were interested. It turns out they are. So, here it is!
I tuned the article and added a section about power laws vs. exponential functions on the 22nd. Google reacted with two quick tests of the content on position 16 for the query.
A step-by-step tutorial for content tuning with the GSC API
You don't need much to pull data from the Google Search Console API: we'll work with Google Sheets and the Search Analytics for Sheets add-on. If you're interested in setting up an automated process, I recommend JR Oakes' article A simple tool for saving GSC data to BigQuery.
Extract data with the Search Analytics for Sheets add-on
Open a new Google Sheet.
Open the Search for Sheets add-on in Google Sheets (see screenshot below).
Select your site under "Verified Site" and a full month or week for "Date Range."
Select "query" and "page" in the "Group By" field.
Click "Request Data."
When you get the data, it will be sorted by clicks. But what you need is to sort by page. So, create a new filter for the first row and sort it by page (see screenshot below).
Filter the "Position" column by "condition = between 5 and 20" (you can also choose between 11 and 20) to focus on queries for which you have a chance to rank higher.
Filter the "Impressions" column by "condition = greater than 50" to sort out noisy queries. I recommend increasing the threshold until you have about 10 queries per page; otherwise, it gets too confusing.
Select a color scale and use numbers for "Minpoint" and "Maxpoint." I selected a range of 100 and 1,000 because that's where most queries I rank for fall into, but you can play with this.
Do the same for the "Position" column, but with other numbers (screenshot below).
Enter “=countif($A:$A,A1)>1”.
Select a cool color (I took red).
After you have tuned your content, repeat this process with a comparable data range to understand how successful your changes were. If you've pulled the initial data set for January, for example, pull it for February to compare. The same applies to weekly comparisons. Just make sure you stay consistent with the time range and watch out for seasonality.
Let me know if this worked for you and what you found. My Twitter DMs are open.