Google Analytics & Google Search Console www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console Please note that Google Search Console used to be known as Google Webmaster Tools. They are both the same tool and you may see references using either of these names. First of all you need to ensure that both Google Analytics & Google Search Console are connected and verified on your website. You will need to log into each one individually and check this if you are unsure. The login details should be the same as any other Google Accounts that you have. If you haven't accessed Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools at all in the past you will need to just create your account. Google Analytics: http://www.google.com.au/analytics/ Google Search Console: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ If you don’t see your website details or you have a warning about either Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools not being verified then this is the very first thing you need to fix. To verify your website you will need to add some code to your website so that Google can verify that it is your website. If you are unsure on how to do this, you will need to get in touch with your web developer and ask them to insert the code for you. If you are really stuck, let me know and I may be able to help depending on your website platform. If you verify Google Analytics first you can then simply verify Webmaster Tools by connecting it to your Google Analytics account. You will find this on the verify screen when you login to your Webmaster Tools account. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console Once you have both verified you also need to connect your Google Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account. To do this login to your Analytics account and go to Acquisition, then click on Search Engine Optimisation and then click on Queries. If you see a screen like this you need to Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing and follow the steps. Google Analytics So lets now look at what we need to look at in Google Analytics. There are 3 main reports that you should be monitoring. Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console 1. Queries This will show you all the keywords you currently rank for that people are using in Google search, the number of impressions you are receiving – so how many times Google has showed your website as a result of someone using that keyword in search, the number of clicks you received through to your website for that keyword, your average ranking position in Google for that keyword and the click through rate as a percentage. Just a note here that Google is approximately 1 day behind with their reporting so just keep that in mind when checking these results. So to put it in basic terms if you want to increase the traffic to your website you want to increase the click-through-rate which is the people clicking onto your website. To increase this click-through-rate we need to increase your ranking position and we need to make sure your meta title and meta description are enticing enough for people to click on it. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console If your ranking on the page is good and your descriptions are appealing than a good click-through-rate is at least 20% when you are getting thousands of monthly impressions. You can now use this data to improve your optimisation even more on the keywords that are highly relevant to the page you are targeting for that keyword. If the keyword is getting a lot of impressions (and by a lot I mean thousands in a month) but the click through rate is less than 7% go in and update your meta title and meta description and then monitor the results to see if that improves your CTR. Keep in mind though that you want to leave your targeted keyword in the appropriate area of the meta title and meta description. 2. Landing Pages Next the landing page report shows you which pages on your website are ranking well, the number of impressions they are receiving, the number of clicks they are getting, their average ranking position and their average click- through-rate. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console This report is showing your most popular pages first. From this report you can examine what pages have the highest number of impressions but the lowest click-through rate. These are the pages you want to focus on and once again improve your meta title and meta description to increase that click through rate. Your CTR will be lower on this report than the queries report as it isn’t focusing on a single keyword. It shows results for the entire page and it is normal for one page to rank for more than one keyword, even though you have only optimised it for one main keyword. 3. Geographical Summary This report shows what countries your search engine results traffic is coming from. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console This will give you an indication that you are showing up in the countries you are wanting to target. Another couple of sections to look at within Google Analytics is real-time. This will tell you how many people are currently on your website in real-time. Handy if you are running a big campaign and want to get an idea of how it is working in real time. In acquisition, this will show you how people are finding your website whether it be by organic search, coming directly to your website, from social media or referrals (which is clicking on a link from other websites) . This will give you a good indication of what areas of your marketing are working. You can click on each link to go through and look at each one in more detail. Another important statistic that you need to be checking is your bounce rate. It is important to have this as low as possible. Google considers a bounce if someone clicks through to your website and they than either close it down or click on the back button fairly quickly. This usually means that they consider the page unrelated to what they are looking for. This is why it is so important when you are optimising your pages for a certain keyword, that that keyword is highly relevant to the page you are sending people to. If you have a high bounce rate, Google will lower your rankings for that keyword. So if you are getting a high bounce rate for a particular page, edit the meta page title and meta page description and update the content on the actual page to make it more informative and/or relevant. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console The pages/session is also another good statistic to keep an eye on. This will tell you how many pages in total a visitor looked at before leaving your website. This is where your internal linking also comes in handy. Once visitors have read one page of your website you want to entice them to click through to other pages to keep them on your website as long as possible. Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) Once you have the Search Console all set up, you will see your dashboard with your website listed. If you have more than one website connected to your account you will see the entire list but I will assume for the majority of businesses you will only have one. Click on the website name to go through to see all the information on your website. 1. Submit XML Sitemap The first most important thing to check is the your XML sitemap for your website has been submitted. This is very important to push along your SEO efforts as it helps Google index all the pages of your website quicker. If you see something like this than you know it has been submitted. If you see a message saying “No sitemaps” than get this done straight away. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console You will need to either have a XML sitemap created for your website. For a lot of websites it is simply www.yoursiteURL/sitemap.xml or something similar. So if you are unsure put this URL into a browser to see if it brings up something like this – this is the sitemap for my website. www.webonize.com.au Google Analytics & Google Search Console If you have a Wordpress website and you are using a SEO plugin (which you should be) then you should find that this sitemap has been created automatically for you. Once again I am happy to take a look for you and advise on your website or you can always ask your web developer as well if you can’t find it. Don’t let you web developer tell you that this isn’t important – you definitely need to submit a XML sitemap to Google – it can make the world of difference to your rankings. If you are submitting your xml sitemap for the first time, normally it will take Google a few hours to check through it all. 2. Robots.txt file The robots.txt file is a text file on your website that basically tells search engines how to crawl and index your pages.