Have you connected Google Search Console to your website? If not, you oughta!
At some point you’ve probably installed Google Analytics on your website—which shows you WHAT visitors on your site are doing while perusing its pages. Google Analytics provides data points like: the average amount of time site visitors spend on any given page, the destinations they navigate to-and-from, buttons they click, and so on. Put simply, Google Analytics shows you WHAT visitors do while on your website.
What it doesn’t do is show you HOW visitors got to your website in the first place. However, Google Search Console, does exactly that—it shows you how website visitors navigate their way onto your website.
For example, it’ll show you the top Google search queries that rank your pages, how often those pages rank versus how often they’re actually clicked, and all sorts of other valuable insights.
In addition, Google Search Console is also a powerful tool to keep optics on which of your site’s pages are or are not properly indexed by Google. However, that’s not the focus of this video.
Point is—if you haven’t already done so—you should install Google Search Console so you can monitor your site’s performance in Google search results. Here’s how:
Navigate to: search.google.com/search-console/about and press the “Get Started” button.
Enter your site’s URL in the Domain “property type” box and continue.
Finally, you’ll need to verify that you own your website, which may require your site developer’s assistance. Follow the on-screen steps to copy/paste the unique TXT record into the DNS configuration, which can be located by logging into your website hosting service account. For example, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, etc. If you don’t have access to the DNS, simply send that TXT record to your developer with the same instructions.
Once you’re logged in, you’ll be able to see data on your top-performing web pages, Google search queries in which your site/pages rank, and a bunch more advanced SEO tools, like sitemaps, page indexing, and so on.