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Use your Search Console and Analytics data
Connect Google read-only, find striking-distance queries, and rank pages by where a push is most worth it.
Search Console is the one source of search data that comes from Google itself: the queries people typed, how often you appeared, where, and how often they clicked. Google Analytics adds what those visitors did on your site. OpenSEO reads both, read-only, and nothing here spends from your YepAPI balance.
Connect Google
Open Search performance
In a project, open Search performance. If it says Google is not set up, the person running your OpenSEO needs to create a Google OAuth client first: see Set up Google sign-in.
Connect a Google account
Under Google Search Console, click Connect a Google account. Google asks you to choose an account and allow read-only access. Leave the permission ticked: without it nothing is connected. Search Console and Analytics are separate permissions, so each has its own button, and connecting one never grants the other.
Choose the property
Back in OpenSEO, pick the account and the property this project should read. A
sc-domain:property covers the whole domain; a URL property covers one prefix. Properties you can see but have no verified access to are listed and greyed out, because Google returns no data for them.Optionally, add Google Analytics
Under Google Analytics, connect an account the same way and choose a GA4 property. It adds organic traffic figures and makes the opportunity scores below use the value of each page's visits.
Read the report
Pick a period (7 days, 28 days or 3 months) and optionally a device. Search Console data lags by about three days, so periods end three days ago. Each total is compared with the period of the same length just before it.
| Figure | How it is worked out |
|---|---|
| Clicks, impressions | Summed over the days in the period. |
| CTR | Clicks divided by impressions for the whole period. |
| Average position | Weighted by impressions, so a query seen 1,000 times counts more than one seen once. A lower number is better, so a fall shows as an improvement. |
Striking distance
The default tab lists queries one push from the top of page one. For each query OpenSEO takes the page of yours that ranks best for it, and keeps it when that page sits at positions 5 to 20. They are sorted by impressions, so the first rows are where improving a page would be seen most. Select rows and click Save as keywords to add them to Saved keywords, tagged search-console, ready for a rank tracker.
Queries and pages
The Queries and Pages tabs page through everything Search Console has, by clicks, 50 rows at a time, with CSV export of the page you are on.
Opportunities
Opportunities ranks pages at positions 4 to 20 by where a push is most worth it. Each page gets a score from 0 to 100:
| Part | Weight | Measured by |
|---|---|---|
| Demand | 0.5 | Impressions, on a log scale, so one huge page does not flatten the rest. |
| Value | 0.3 | The page's key-event rate from GA4 (conversions per session), or its engagement rate when the property has no key events. |
| Reachability | 0.2 | How close the page is to the top: 20 minus its position. |
Each part is a percentile among the pages listed, so scores compare pages with each other, not with other sites. Pages are matched to GA4 by host and path. Without Google Analytics the value part is left out and the other two are rescaled, and the page says so. Search Console counts days in Pacific time and GA4 in the property's time zone, so the two line up only roughly; the page warns when they differ.
Organic traffic
With Google Analytics connected, the page also shows organic-search sessions, engagement rate, key events and revenue against the previous period, and the landing pages search visitors arrive on. Periods are complete days up to yesterday in the property's time zone. When Google sampled or thresholded the data, the page says the figures are approximate.