Let’s jump right into it. This training is about how to find SEO keywords with Google Search Console. I’m going to go through a quick PowerPoint and then we’ll get into the tool itself.

For those of you who don’t know me, this is going out to my Facebook and YouTube. My background is in graphic design. I worked for an ad agency when I first graduated, and then for a number of years I worked for an executive recruiter here in Asheville, where I’m based. On the side I started building websites and learning how to get them to the top of Google. One of my experiments was really successful — actually a lot of them were — but one in particular reached the top of Google around 2007 and 2008 and was generating about $20,000 of business a month. I thought, this is pretty exciting, I’m going to start doing web design and helping clients show up in Google. So I created PushLeads, did some online mentoring for the first couple of years, and have really been working with local companies for the last seven or eight years doing digital marketing. That’s my background. Now let’s get into Google Search Console.

What is Google Search Console? Google provides a lot of different tools, and one of them is called Google Search Console. It’s a free tool. Essentially, Google Search Console tells you how people are finding you in Google. That’s really important because it helps you find the keywords people are searching for. For example, I do SEO — showing up in Google — so if I want to know how people are finding me, I need to find out what they’re looking for. "SEO services" or "Asheville SEO" are examples of keywords people search for. Google Search Console also shows you what people are clicking on.

One important thing to note is that Google Search Console only shows you local searches — specifically your neighborhood, not your whole city. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a map of Asheville. My company is based in East Asheville, and when you use Google Search Console, you essentially have a bubble — a neighborhood — within your city where it shows you ranking data. So Google Search Console is showing me where I’m ranking in that neighborhood. If I wanted to know where I rank across all of Asheville, Google Search Console will not show you that.

There are really four different levels that people care about when it comes to showing up in Google. First is your neighborhood. Second is your city. Third is other cities — Asheville, Greenville, Charlotte, Spartanburg, Knoxville, for example. Most of the companies I work with just care about showing up in one city, not multiple. But some clients want to show up in multiple cities. The fourth level is nationwide. I have a client in California who wants to show up nationwide for a line of high-quality makeup lighting products, so we’re tracking nationwide for them. But as I said, most clients just care about one city.

Just be aware that when you set up Google Search Console, it’s only going to show you where you rank in your neighborhood. You can find keywords from that data and then use other tools to track where you stand across your full city.

So let’s talk about how to find keywords in Google Search Console. What you’re going to do is log in. If you’ve never done that and don’t know what I’m talking about, just Google "Search Console" and click the first result. If you’ve never used the tool before, you’ll need to connect your website or domain to Google Search Console, which involves a couple of technical steps to verify ownership. Once it’s set up, you open your domain — my domain is PushLeads, for my business — and then you click on the Performance tab. From there I’m going to compare the last 28 days to the previous period.

Here’s the Performance tab. I click on the date range selector and choose "Compare last 28 days to previous period." What this tells me is that I received 22 clicks this month versus last month. I can also see what people searched for down in the query list. But what we really care about is not what’s on that screen — it’s the Export button. We’re going to export this as an Excel spreadsheet, which opens up a file we can then dig into.

Once you have the spreadsheet, you’re going to filter it and sort by the last 28 days. Here’s the spreadsheet — I’ve already sorted it. You can sort by one of several columns. I sort by "Last 28 days — Position," which tells you where you’re ranking in Google in your neighborhood over that period. When I sort smallest to largest, I ignore the zeros and go down to the first real results.

These are all actual searches: "Asheville SEO service," "best digital agency," "small business marketing companies," "local SEO firms," "Asheville SEO PPC," "Asheville SEO services Asheville North Carolina." These are all real queries people typed into Google. I can go down the list and highlight the ones that matter. "Digital marketing agency," "digital marketing company," "internet marketing agency" — I can highlight those. If I were a plumber, I’d highlight "plumbing web design" and similar terms. Some of these don’t apply at all — "collection agency," "best collection agency," "Google algorithm update" — I don’t care about those keywords. I care about searches that are relevant to my business, like "online marketing companies." So I highlight the ones that matter and then I can check where I rank — not just in my neighborhood, but across all of Asheville.

The tool for that is called the Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool. You can tell an engineer named it. I put my search in there and I can see the map results — I’m seeing Maps listings, I see White Fox, another company, and then me. So I’m number three in Maps for that search. In the organic results I’m number seven. So for that particular search I’m showing up at position three in Maps and position seven in organic. The goal of SEO is to show up in as many map searches as possible — ideally in the top three — and also in the regular organic results. White Fox is showing up in both Maps and organic, so they’re getting the lion’s share of the traffic. That’s fine — we’ll work on that.

This applies to any business. If you’re a psychotherapist — I have a new client who is a psychotherapist — she cares about keywords like "psychotherapist" or "EMDR therapy." I have a local plumber who cares about "Asheville plumbing" and "Asheville plumber." The process is the same: find all these keywords, make a list, and spot-check them with that tool.

Now, for those of us who do SEO for a living and have 15 to 20 ongoing clients or more, we use tools to track this automatically instead of checking manually. One of the best tools I’ve found is SEMrush. It runs about $100 to $200 a month, though it may be cheaper if you’re only tracking one business. In SEMrush you can open your project, click "View All Keywords," and see your positions over time.

Looking at the last 30 days, I can see that on April 10th I had a visibility score of about 6.59%. Visibility is a metric that runs on a scale of 0 to 100. Most people have somewhere around 2% to 10% visibility. I’ve gone from 6% visibility up to 16%, and part of that has been blogging, but there are other things we’ve been doing as well to push rankings up. As my rankings have improved, we’ve gone from getting one or two calls a month to about 5 to 15 calls a month. More leads are the whole point. We practice what we preach — we do our own SEO — and you can see the difference right there in the data.

What I can do next is take the keywords I highlighted in the spreadsheet, filter by color, and add them to my SEMrush keyword tracker. I just added another 22 keywords to the project. SEMrush will now track all of them and factor them into my visibility score. What we really care about is getting as many of those keywords as possible to the top of Google.

After adding the keywords, I let SEMrush refresh — it takes about a minute — and then I look at the volume column. Some of these keywords have no search volume at all. For example, "local SEO services North Carolina" shows zero volume, so I can delete that keyword. I scroll through and delete any keyword where nobody is actually searching for that term. Nobody is searching for "SEO agency Asheville," nobody is searching for "SEO company Asheville," nobody is searching for "Asheville PPC" — so I delete those. This is actually one of the things I’ve noticed when talking to other people who say they do SEO: if you’re optimizing for terms that nobody is actually searching for in Google, what’s the point?

So to recap the whole process: use Google Search Console to export your keyword data, sort by position, highlight the relevant terms, spot-check your rankings manually with the Ad Preview and Diagnostics tool, or load them into SEMrush to track everything automatically. Then clean out any keywords with zero search volume.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below this video or reach out to me directly. You can also go to PushLeads.com, where you’ll see a free scan tool. Just put in your URL, your search phrase, and your name or email, hit "Scan Now," and the tool will show you how well your website is performing for that search phrase. The results get emailed to you, and from there we can have a conversation.

I’m Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads — we play in traffic.

Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads, and I help small businesses get more leads without struggle or frustration. What I want to do in this video is show you what Google Search Console is and how you can use it to find new search phrases you can show up for in Google.

The first thing is to explain what Google Search Console is. GSC is essentially a tool that Google provides to track what’s going on with your website — but primarily to track how people are finding you in Google. If you have a new business, an existing business, or someone working for you doing SEO, they’re probably using this tool. It’s great for discovering how people are finding you.

You may have heard of Google Analytics. That tool shows you what’s happening on your site — where people are going once they arrive. GSC is different. In this video we’re focused on Search Console, so to get there just search "Search Console" and click "Start now." If you haven’t set it up before, you’ll need to add a property, but we’re not going to cover that here.

What I’m showing you right now is what’s happening inside one of my current client accounts. These guys do bathroom renovation, primarily in the Asheville area. They’re called Two-Day Bath and Shower — they’ll essentially renovate your whole bathroom in about two days. They’re paying me to do SEO to get them to the top of Google for bathroom renovation and related terms.

Within GSC, once you log in, select your property on the left-hand side. If you have multiple properties, choose the right one. Generally the first thing I do is look at the Overview tab, which shows you where clicks are coming from, how many pages are showing up in Google, and things like that. But really what I want to draw your attention to is the Performance tab.

The Performance tab is where you find out what people are actually searching when they find you. I click Compare and set it to the last 28 days versus the previous period — so this month versus last month. As of the time of this recording, around January 2025, we have 99 clicks in the last 28 days and we had 69 clicks in December. We’re also showing up for a total of 2,700 impressions. Impressions are when someone sees you in Google but doesn’t necessarily click through to your website. The average CTR — clickthrough rate — is about 4%, meaning 4% of impressions result in an actual click. The average position is also shown, but honestly the metric I pay the most attention to is simply how many clicks you’re getting this month versus last month.

Before I continue, I want to explain something. Google does not like to tell you where all your data comes from — and I know, it’s a love-hate relationship. Google tracks every click and knows exactly where they all come from, but they only show you the source of maybe 10% of them. So you can see the queries that drove traffic, but only a fraction of the total picture.

Scrolling down, we can look at the top queries — these are the actual searches people typed into Google when they found this client. I can see 17 clicks on their brand name, Two-Day Bath and Shower, this month versus 14 last month. Bathroom remodel had three clicks this month versus zero last month. Bathroom remodel Asheville had three clicks versus zero last month. If I add up the visible numbers, I’m probably looking at around 30 of the 99 total clicks. A lot of the time we have to use our intuition to infer where the rest of the clicks are coming from, based on where the site is ranking in Google.

As I scroll further down I start hitting zeros — for example, "bathroom renovation services" shows zero clicks. But if that search is ranking at the top of Google, I can guarantee it had some clicks. That’s exactly why we export this data.

I’ll scroll back up, click Export, and download the Excel file. This gives me a spreadsheet of all the searches from the last month. I’m a bit of a spreadsheet geek, so what I do is put a filter on the data and sort by clicks from smallest to largest. Then I expand the columns so I can read everything clearly.

Here’s an example term: "bathroom remodel showrooms near me." They don’t actually have a showroom, but I’m using it to illustrate the process. Column A is the search query. The next columns show clicks this month versus last month, impressions, and then position in Google. Last month the position was zero, meaning it wasn’t showing up anywhere in the first ten pages of Google. This month it’s at position one — meaning it’s showing up at the top of Google in Arden, North Carolina, where this client is based, probably within about a two-mile radius. So if you were in that radius and searched for that term, you’d find these guys.

It’s great to know we’re ranking for that term, but to find out exactly where we stand across the whole city of Arden, Asheville, or wherever you’re targeting, we need to take this data into a rank-tracking tool like SEMrush. SEMrush tells us precisely where we rank for each keyword across the full service area.

So I go down the list and highlight the terms I think are important for this client. I’ve highlighted about 10 to 15 terms — things like "remodel bathroom shower," "bathroom improvements near me," and "bathroom renovations." Looking at some of these, a lot of them were at zero last month and are now at the top of Google. Bathroom construction moved from position four to position three. Bathroom reconstruction moved from the middle of page two all the way to the top of page one. That’s ten positions on a page, so that’s a meaningful jump.

Once I’ve highlighted enough terms, I filter by color, copy those rows, and paste the keywords into SEMrush. Inside SEMrush I paste them in as new keywords to track and click "Add keywords to campaign." It then starts tracking those ten additional keywords. After I hit Save it takes about an hour, but after that I can see exactly where we rank for each of those terms in Asheville, North Carolina, on a mobile phone — or whatever location and device you’re tracking.

Hopefully this has been useful. If you’re doing SEO, make sure you’re doing this. And if you’re working with an SEO person, I really recommend sitting down with them and asking them to walk you through something like this. They should be able to show you this kind of data. I’m Jeremy with PushLeads — it’s all about getting more leads with less struggle and effort. Thanks.