Your Google Search Console data, beside the revenue it produced
- Trigger
- Search
- Lands in
- Dashboard, with a weekly Slack summary
- Setup
- 2 min
- Needs
- Nothing else
Search traffic is up 22% week over week
example.com, seven days to Monday
- Clicks
- 1,840 (up 22%)
- Average position
- 8.4, from 11.1
Most of the gain came from one guide finally reaching the first page of results.
The half of the funnel nobody watches
Viably is already good at what happens once somebody arrives. It captures the form they filled in, the payment that followed and the conversation your team had with them. What it could never see was the moment before all of that, when a person typed something into Google and decided your result was worth a click.
Connecting Google Search Console closes that gap. The query that started a customer relationship now lives in the same system as the revenue at the end of it, which means questions your team probably gave up asking become answerable again. Which search terms actually earn money rather than merely bringing visitors. Whether a page that lost traffic slipped in the rankings or simply stopped being searched for. How long it really takes for a new piece of writing to start pulling its weight.
Impressions tell you how many people were looking for something you could have answered, including all the ones who chose somebody else. That number moves before your traffic does.
Search brings people to a landing page, and Viably already knows which landing pages produce sign-ups. Put the two together and a search term stops being a vanity metric.
When clicks in Search Console and sessions in your analytics start drifting apart, something is broken between the click and the page. Usually a redirect, a consent banner or a tag that stopped firing.
Two minutes, and no code
Google lets you share a property with a colleague by email address. Viably has an address, so you share it the same way. There is nothing to install, no consent screen to click through, and no API credentials to look after.
Viably shows you a Google service address in its Search Console settings. It is the same one for every property you add, so you only ever need to find it once.
In Search Console, open Settings, then Users and permissions, and add that address as a Restricted user. Restricted is deliberate, because reading performance data is all Viably ever does.
Come back and press Check access. Viably lists everything Google will now let it read, you choose what to track, and the sixteen months of history start loading straight away.
A domain property in Google reads sc-domain:example.com and covers every subdomain and both protocols in one place. Granting access there usually replaces four or five separate grants on individual URL prefixes, and it counts as a single property against your plan.
What your team sees
One page per workspace, covering every property you have connected, and readable by anyone rather than only the person who owns the SEO.
Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, each shown against the period before so you can see which way things are going rather than only where they stand.
The search terms people used and the pages they landed on, filterable by country and device, so you can ask which page slipped rather than only whether the site did.
Loaded when you connect, so last year's seasonal peak is already there to compare against on day one instead of a year from now.
Search performance joins your weekly pulse, with a button that breaks the week down day by day without anyone having to leave the thread.
Average position is weighted by how often each result was actually seen, so a term shown three times cannot pull the number around as hard as one shown thirty thousand times. Click-through rate is always worked out from the underlying clicks and impressions rather than by averaging a column of percentages. Both are easy to get wrong in a spreadsheet, and both go wrong in the direction that flatters.
Being told, instead of remembering to look
A dashboard only helps the people who open it, and search problems have a habit of going unnoticed for a fortnight. Viably watches for three things worth interrupting somebody about, and stays quiet the rest of the time.
Measured against the same weekday over the previous four weeks. Search traffic falls every weekend on almost every site, and an alert that fires each Saturday is one your team mutes by the end of the month.
Star a page or a search term and you hear about it when it drops off the first page of results. Nothing else in the long tail can set this off, which is what keeps it meaningful.
If somebody removes Viably's access in Google, or a property stops returning data, you are told once and then left alone until it recovers.
Alerts arrive in whichever channel already receives your weekly pulse, and a repeat about the same property replies under the original message rather than starting a fresh one, so a week of the same problem reads as a single conversation.
Ask about it in Slack
Most people will never open an SEO dashboard, and they should not have to in order to get an answer. Once Search Console is connected, @Via can answer questions about it in whatever channel somebody happens to be standing in.
“Is the site doing better than last month?” works as well as anything more technical. Nobody has to know the word impressions to get a useful reply.
Answers come from the data Viably has already collected for your properties, with the period stated, rather than from a guess about what is probably happening.
No, and it is not meant to. Search Console remains the place to submit sitemaps, inspect a URL, or work through an indexing problem. Viably reads the performance side of it and puts that where your team already looks, so the numbers reach people who were never going to log in on their own.
Open the Search Console settings in Viably, copy the address it shows you, and add that address as a Restricted user on your property in Google. That grant is the whole setup. Once it is in place, the weekly summary and the alerts arrive in whichever Slack channel you have chosen, and your team can ask @Via about search performance without leaving a thread.
You need somebody who owns the property in Search Console, because only an owner can add a user to it. Everything after that happens in Viably. There is no API key to generate, no code to deploy, and nothing to install on your website.
Sixteen months, which is everything Google keeps. Viably pulls all of it when you connect a property rather than starting from the day you signed up, so you can compare this month against the same month last year on your first afternoon with it.
Because Google's do. Search Console keeps revising recent days for roughly forty-eight hours as it finishes counting, so Viably re-reads the last week on every sync and marks anything still settling. Those days are dimmed in the charts, and the alerts ignore them entirely, since a half-counted day looks exactly like a collapse and nobody needs to be woken up for that.
One property on the free plan and three on Plus. A domain property counts once and covers every subdomain and protocol underneath it, so a single grant on example.com usually brings in the blog, the app subdomain and the marketing site together.
That is the reason this exists. Viably already knows which pages produce sign-ups and payments, because it captures those from your webhooks and email. Adding search data means the query someone typed into Google sits in the same system as the money that followed, and the two can finally be read side by side.
Viably only ever reads. The access you grant is Restricted, the lowest level Google offers that still returns performance data, and it carries no ability to change settings, submit sitemaps or add users. You can withdraw it at any time from Search Console, and Viably notices on its next sync and tells you.
Add Viably’s address to your property in Google Search Console and sixteen months of history load on their own. One property is included on the free plan.
Add Viably to Slack