Docs · Earn & grow

Growth and Google Search Console

The Growth page shows how Google sees your articles and helps you improve the ones that are close to doing well.

Connecting Search Console

fastCMS reads Search Console through a service account, a small robot Google account that you give read-only access. It takes about five minutes:

Make sure your site is added and verified in Google Search Console.
In Google Cloud Console, create a project (any name) and enable Google Search Console API (search for it under APIs & Services → Library).
Go to IAM & Admin → Service Accounts → Create service account. Give it any name; no roles are needed.
Open the new account, go to Keys → Add key → Create new key → JSON. A file downloads.
Back in Search Console, open Settings → Users and permissions → Add user. Paste the service account's email (it ends in iam.gserviceaccount.com; it's the client_email in the file) and choose Restricted.
Open the downloaded file in a text editor, copy everything, paste it on the Growth page and click Connect. If the account can see more than one property, pick the one for this site.

fastCMS then fetches your numbers once a day. Google's figures run about three days behind, and new sites can take a few weeks to show much.

The three tabs

Overview: clicks, impressions, click rate and average position for the last 28 days against the 28 before, a trend chart, and your top pages.
Opportunities:
Almost on page one: ranking 8 to 25. A refresh that answers more of the searches can lift them.
Seen but not clicked: on page one but few people click. Usually the search title and description need work.
Losing clicks: down 30% or more.
Content health (works without Search Console): articles not updated in a year, short ones, and those missing a featured image, a search description or internal links.

Refresh with AI

Refresh with AI rewrites an article using the searches it really appears for, keeping all its links and images. Fix title & description only writes a better search title and description (very cheap).

Either way, you get a suggestion first: what changed and why, and the current and suggested versions side by side. Nothing changes on your site until you click Apply, and the previous version stays in the article's History.

Refreshed articles show an Updated date, which readers and Google both notice.