WHAT ARE GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two practical online tools for monitoring the performance of your website, such as the number of impressions, click-throughs, indexing status, and overall search performance. Each serves a different purpose, but they can assist you in your SEO and digital marketing efforts.

HERE IS AN OVERVIEW OF EACH ONE AND HOW IT CAN HELP WITH SEO

GOOGLE ANALYTICAL

Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that tracks all the traffic to your website. Once you generate and add the unique Google Analytics HTML code to your website’s coding, it will track how your visitors interact with your website. Your Google Analytics dashboard will let you generate a report that provides statistics on all this information. 

EXAMPLE

Here are some examples of what Google Analytics tracks on your website to help with SEO:

·         Number of page views

·         The average amount of time spent on each page

·         The percentage of people who leave after visiting one page only (also called the bounce rate)

·         How visitors engage with your website (engagement rate)

·         The website where your visitors came from before coming to your site (traffic source)

·         Analysis of the SEO keywords that brought visitors to your website from Google

·         The platforms that your visitors use when visiting your website (e.g., mobile devices, desktop computers)

·         Page speed insights that show how long it takes for certain pages to load

IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE

Google Analytics helps identify the demographics of your visitors and the various actions they take on your website. This key information is ideal for SEO because it can help you determine your target audience and the information and products on your website that interest them the most.

Based on this information, you can modify your website’s content and run advertisement campaigns that target your key demographics and satisfy their demands and needs.

FIXING ISSUES WITH YOUR WEBSITE

Google Analytics also serves as a problem tracker. It enables you to identify any issues with your website that could be causing traffic to leave quickly or fail to enter your website. Here are some of the website issues that you can spot with Google Analytics:

HIGH BOUNCE RATE

A high rate of people visiting your website and leaving quickly without visiting another page. Too much bouncing is usually attributed to poor-quality web content, irrelevant content, or slow-loading pages. Once you discover the pages with high bounce rates, you will know to investigate them to figure out the problem. 

SPAM TRAFFIC

Wouldn’t you like to know whether your traffic is legitimate? If you see too many visitors coming from anonymous sources where you did not advertise, it may be spam traffic. Google Analytics lets you filter out spam traffic so that your website is not penalized for it on Google. 

TRACK BROKEN LINKS

Google Analytics will track the number of broken links on your websites. These links bring visitors to 404 error pages, which can hurt your ranking in Google. Knowing about these error pages can prompt you to fix them before they hurt your ranking.  

 

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Search Console is another free online tool from Google. It ultimately allows you to measure your website’s performance on Google search results pages. Suppose you are concerned about ranking your website higher on Google. In that case, you will need to utilize the power of the Google Search Console to gain insights into your website’s indexing and ranking status on the search engine.

 

EXAMPLE

Here are some examples of what Google Analytics tracks on your website to help with SEO:

·         The most popular search queries that people enter in search engines to find your website.

·         The percentage of people who see your website’s link listed in search engines AND click on it to visit your website.

·         The number of times your website’s link appeared on Google search results pages.

·         The average position of where your website’s links generally show up on Google search results pages.

·         The keyword performance of how well various keywords successfully drive traffic to your website

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANALYTICS AND CONSOLE

Some of its tracking features are like Google Analytics, but the two have significant differences. The main difference is that Google Search Console focuses on your website’s search presence and performance, while Google Analytics focuses more on tracking user behavior.

However, you can integrate the Google Search Console with Google Analytics for in-depth SEO keyword analysis to better understand the queries and keywords that drive traffic to your website. 

FIXING ISSUES WITH YOUR WEBSITE

Google Search Console can fix issues regarding your website’s indexing and search performance in Google. Here are the specific performance issues that it can help you identify and address:

INDEXING FAILURE

You will see if your website has not been indexed on Google search results pages. Google Search Console will provide detailed information about why it was not indexed. Use this information to make the necessary modifications to make your website eligible for indexing. 

IDENTIFY PAGE ISSUES

The Google search engine crawler will penalize your website if it encounters broken links, blocked pages, or server errors. The Google search console can identify these page errors so that you can quickly resolve them and get your website’s rank back up. 

IDENTIFY SECURITY ISSUES

The search crawler can identify websites with security issues, such as security vulnerabilities, hacked content, and malware infections. Websites like these will be de-indexed until they are made secure again. The Google Search Console will inform you of the security issues present so that you can do something about them. That could mean restoring your website saved on a backup drive or adding a security certificate to secure your website with SSL encryption. 

CONCLUSION

Google Analytics and Google Search Engine are both essential SEO tools for tracking your website’s user behavior and search performance. Knowing this information can assist you in creating or modifying an SEO strategy that will drive more organic traffic to your website and improve user experiences when they visit your website.

Remember that Google Analytics and Google Search Engine are 100% free to use as much as you want. Take advantage of these free analytical tools because there aren’t too many other good ones out there