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A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics

October 2, 2019 By Hazel Jarrett Leave a Comment

Google Analytics is one of the best tools available for tracking the performance of your website and how visitors interact with it. Not only is it free but it also gives useful, meaty data that easily competes with many paid-for analytics programs.

Setting up Google Analytics

If you don’t already have Google Analytics installed on your website, then this is your first step. Essentially, you need to add a piece of code to the source code of your website that gives Google Analytics permission to track and capture data about your traffic.

Here are the steps:
First, you need to set up the website you want to track as a ‘property’ in Google Analytics:

  1. Your very first step, if you don’t already have one, is to create a Google account.
    If you haven’t already got a Google account visit the Account Creation page – https://accounts.google.com/signup
    Fill in the requested information and submit (see image below).create a Google account
  2. Once you’re logged into Google, you can sign up to create a Google Analytics account. Hit ‘Start for Free’ to get going.
  3. Once you’re logged into Google Analytics, click the Admin option in the navigation menu to the bottom left of the page (see number 1 in the image below).
  4. In the Account column (see number 2 in the image below), select the account to which you want to add the property from the dropdown menu.
  5. In the dropdown menu in the Property column (see number 3 in the image below), click Create new property.
  6. Select whether it is a website or a mobile app.
  7. Enter the website or app name (you can track more than one website or app, so – if you are going to working with several different sites or apps – give each ‘property’ a descriptive, easily recognisable name).
  8. For websites only, enter the website URL – make sure you use the correct protocol, i.e. http:// or https:// and that you enter your web address without any extra characters, such as a forward slash, on the end. The correct format would be http://www.example.comrather than example.com/
  9. Select an Industry Category.
  10. Select the Reporting Time Zoneas this will help Google Analytics define when a day begins and ends for the purposes of reporting your data.
  11. Click Get Tracking ID– once you click on this, your property/website will be listed in Google Analytics but you won’t be able to collect any data until you’ve set up the tracking code.

Get Tracking ID

Setting up your Google Analytics tracking code

To collect data from your website, you’ll need the web tracking code (we’ll tell you how to get that below) and access to the source code for your website or the help of a web developer who can add the code on your behalf.

    1. You can find the tracking code snippet for your website by clicking on Tracking info/Tracking codein column two on your Google Analytics admin screen (see number 4 in the image above).
  1. A box will come up on the screen featuring several lines of JavaScript. Copy the entire snippet from the box – this begins with <script> and ends with </script>
  2. If you have a WordPress website, there are a number of plugins designed to make adding the Google Analytics tracking code to your website as simple as possible. You might like to try the Insert Headers and Footers or Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress by MonsterInsights plugins, which are both user-friendly, even for non-techy people.
  3. Alternatively, if you have a WordPress site, you can add the code into the header.php or footer.php file for your website (you’ll find these files through your WordPress dashboard, under Appearance>Editor). If you’re adding the code into the header.php file, paste it before the bit of code that reads: </head>. If you’re adding the code into the footer.php file, paste it before the bit of code that reads: </body>
    You can find a great YouTube tutorial on how to add this code here.
  4. If your website isn’t a WordPress site, you may need to paste your snippet into every web page you want to track. Paste it immediately before the closing </head>tag on each page. As it would be impossible for us to cover every option in this guide, it’s worth looking on YouTube for a tutorial. Google Analytics also has a fantastic help centre.
  5. Finally, you’ll need to check that your code has been set up correctly and that Google Analytics is now working. It can take 24 hours for the Google Analytics servers to update after you add the tracking code, so it will take at least that long before you see data appearing in your Google Analytics account. There are several ways to verify your tracking code is working – you can find your options in the Google Analytics help centre here.

Understanding Google Analytics

Now you have Google Analytics set up for your website, you can start to get to grips with the data and what it all means.

When you log in to Google Analytics, you’ll be presented with a screen that lists the various websites (‘properties’) you’ve set up under your account using the process outlined above. Click on ‘All website data’ under the applicable website.

From here, you will enter the main Reporting screen, which has a menu running down the left-hand side and brings you straight to an overview of your website’s audience for the last seven days. If you want to get an overview of your audience for a different time period, simply click on the drop-down arrow underneath the first section and select the date range you want to see.

the main Reporting screen in Google Analytics

This initial Google Analytics Home screen contains some at-a-glance data for the time period selected:

  • The number of users – this is the number of unique users (both new visitors and returning) who have spent at least one session on your website.
  • The number of sessions – a session is a period where a user engages with your website in some way. One user could account for several sessions if they’ve been back to your site a few times.
  • Your website’s bounce rate – this is the percentage of single-page visits to your site, where a visitor comes in and leaves on the same page without going anywhere else on the site.
  • As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.A high bounce rate might suggest that you need to look at ways to make your main landing pages, including the Home page, more engaging to your target customers. If your website is new, you can probably expect to see your high bounce rate come down over the next few weeks but keep an eye on this figure in case it doesn’t improve.
  • The average session duration– i.e. how long each session lasts on average. The longer your session average, the more likely Google is to view your site as ‘sticky’, attracting visitors who want to read what you have to offer. This stat is sometimes referred to as ‘dwell time’.

Further down the Analytics Home screen there are sections that cover how the site acquires users, and more information on the sites’ users, including the times of day they visit, which countries they are visiting from, the device they are using to access your website and which pages they visit. We’ll go into more detail on this.  

Customisation in Google Analytics

Customisation in Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics provides some fantastic information in its standard format but the Customisation tools allow you build and customise your own reports from scratch.

This can take a bit of practice so you might want to experiment with the Customisation options once you’ve got to grips with the rest of the data outlined in this guide.

Essentially, the Customisation tools allow you to customise your dashboard, reports and alerts so that you can prioritise what data you view for each web property.

There are so many customisation options within this feature that it would be impossible to cover them all here. Once you feel more confident about the data that’s available through Google Analytics, I would recommend tinkering with different customised views and reports.

If you’re not sure where to start, you might want to check out the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery where Analytics gurus can upload templates for dashboards, custom reports and segments that other users might find helpful.

I found an excellent blog article from Neil Patel about his favourite custom reports that you might want to dive into when you’re ready.

I’d also recommend Econsultancy’s guide to setting up custom reports.

Real-time data in Google Analytics

Real-time data in Google Analytics

As the name would suggest, the Real Time option in the main left-hand navigation menu of Google Analytics lets you see what’s happening live on your site at any given moment. The Overview screen (see the picture above) shows at a glance how many visitors are currently on the site, the top active pages – i.e. what pages visitors are currently viewing, how long they’ve been on the site, the number of pages they’ve viewed, where they’re located, how they found your site (e.g. social media, search engine), and the keywords used to find the site.

This is a really useful tool if you’re running a specific campaign or you’ve published a new blog and have promoted it on several platforms, as you can see which platform is driving traffic to your site most effectively.

Under the Overview option, you can also click on Locations, Traffic sources, Content, Events and Conversions for more in-depth real-time data about who’s visiting your website and where they come from.

 

Audience data in Google Analytics

Audience data There are a number of menus and sub-menus under the Audience heading.

  • The Demographics and Interests data is there to help you better understand your website visitors – how old they are, their gender and their interests. This is all information that you can use to begin creating or refining your profile for your target customer.
    You may need to make a slight change to your tracking code to support Display Advertising, which enables you to access this demographic data.
  • Under the Geo heading, you can click on Language or Location to find out more about where your customers are based. You can view the Location by Continent, Subcontinent, Country/Territory or City. This is a helpful tool if you’re trying to attract local business.For example, I’ve known clients who run hotels and restaurants make good use of this data as it’s shown them that a lot of their website traffic comes from people in London who are looking for weekend breaks to the countryside, enabling them to tweak their on-page copy to make it more appealing to these potential customers.
  • The Behaviour report lets you look at data around your new and returning customers. You can see, for example, whether you get a higher bounce rate from new visitors or from returning visitors. A high bounce rate for new visitors might suggest that your website isn’t making what you offer clear, whereas you might experience a higher bounce rate for returning visitors because they are literally popping on to your site to read a specific blog article or to check something they’ve already seen on the site, then leaving because they’ve already read much of your content.
  • The Behaviour>Frequency & Recency data shows you how many times returning customers tend to come back and the average number of days between sessions.
  • The Behaviour>Engagement report lets you drill down more into how long people are spending on your site and how many pages they’re reading. Are people spending just 0-10 seconds on your site or spending minutes or even hours reading your content? You may spot some trends here.
  • The Technology data enables you to see what browsers and operating systems people are using to view your website. It’s a good idea to check that visitors are able to see your website properly in any browser. You can do this using a tool like Browser Shots or BrowserStack.
  • The Mobile data will show you how many people are viewing your website from desktops, mobile phones or tablets. Click on Devices and you can even see which mobiles and tablets people are using.
    These days, it’s important to have a responsive website. A responsive site is one that will adapt to fit the device on which it’s being viewed. If you don’t have a responsive or mobile version of your site, you may find you lose visitors who are on mobile devices because they may have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to view your pages, the text may also be difficult to read, and buttons and pull-down menus wrongly sized.
  • Benchmarking data is great for contextualising the performance of your website against trends in your industry as it compares your site’s performance to data averaged from thousands of other sites in the same sector. This valuable context can help you to set meaningful targets, gain insight into trends occurring across your industry, and find out how you are doing compared to your competition.The data in the six columns breaks things down by the default ‘Channel’ grouping, i.e. where the traffic came from, but you can also view the data by location or device. Positive percentages (indicated by green arrows and boxes) show where your website is performing higher than the benchmark, whereas negative numbers show where the site is performing lower than the benchmark. The only exception to this is in the Bounce Rate column where negative percentages mean your bounce rate is lower than the industry benchmark.
  • The Users Flow data enables you to see how visitors move through your website – e.g. what pages they land on, which pages they visit next and where they leave the site.You can sort this data in a multitude of ways; for example, where does traffic from Google bring people into the site? If they arrive on your Home page, where do they go next? If people are coming into your site because of blog links on social media, which blogs are attracting the most traffic? Do people just read the blog and leave or do they stay on the site? What calls to action could you add at the end of your blog articles to keep people reading? Do people on mobile devices flow through the site differently to desktop users? All of this information is available here.

Acquisitions data in Google Analytics

The Acquisitions information available in Google Analytics is where things get really meaty in terms of reviewing your SEO efforts. This is the section to review regularly if you want to know where your traffic is coming from and whether your various campaigns are working.

Acquisitions data As in the other sections, the Overview screen gives you an immediate snapshot of how your website is ‘acquiring’ visitors. This data can be sorted by Channel – e.g. organic traffic, social media, referrals, direct traffic, emails and other – or by Source and/or Medium. If you’ve recently written a guest blog for another site or you’re using a WordPress plugin to retweet old blogs, for example, this is the place to see whether they’ve generated any traffic.

  • The All Traffic data will let you take a deeper look at how your visitors behaved from all channels, mediums and sources. You may see that organic searches through Google account for the biggest percentage or that when people click through from Facebook, they are less likely to bounce away from your site.
  • Under the Referrals category, you can see where visitors have found you through backlinks on other sites, guest blogs, links in your newsletter or directory sites, as just a few examples. If you’re attracting a lot of traffic from a particular source, you might think about how you can nurture this relationship or promote this source more frequently.
  • If you send out a regular newsletter using a mailing service like Mailchimp or Mad Mimi, you can connect it to Google Analytics and review the traffic resulting from the campaign under the Campaigns  Which campaigns generated the most traffic, sessions or new users? Did you do anything differently in that campaign? Could you produce another newsletter on a related topic?
  • The Campaigns>Organic Keywords data is the one that people are often interested in but Google doesn’t tell us as much as it once did here. I personally prefer the data you find under Search Console>Queries (see below). I also find that Google Search Console provides more comprehensive keyword data.Google has reduced the amount of keyword data available in Google Analytics as a reminder that keywords are just a small part of successful SEO and shouldn’t be our primary focus. It’s worth checking out the data here for some information about keywords used to find your site in organic searches. If you use paid-for Google AdWords campaigns, you can also review the keyword performance here.
  • The Campaigns>Cost Analysis data is in BETA testing and will let you see visit, cost and revenue performance data for your paid marketing channels, such as Google AdWords.
  • If you run a Google AdWords campaign, you can link it to your Google Analytics account for a comprehensive breakdown of each campaign’s performance. You will find various options under the Google Ads heading and subheadings.
  • The Search Console section of Google Analytics is where you will find the most helpful data about the keywords people are using to find your website. Click on Queries and you’ll be able to see a breakdown of the keywords used to find you during the given time period, the number of impressions for each keyword (i.e. how many times your website was seen in search engine results pages (SERPs)), the number of clicks through to your site from that keyword search, your average position for the keyword in search engine rankings, and your clickthrough rate (i.e. the percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks). A high clickthrough rate typically means that you are attracting targeted traffic, so you may not be getting a massive number of impressions but those that find your site are interested in visiting it.
    Which are your best ranking keywords? Are they attracting much traffic? Which keywords attract the most impressions? Which keywords give you the best clickthrough rates? The answers to these questions can help you decide whether you need to tweak your content or write blogs around specific topics, for example.

Note: Your Google Search Console and Google Analytics need to be connected to see this data. You can find instructions to link both platforms in our Google Search Console Guide.

  • The Search Console>Landing pages data lets you see which pages most often show up in SERPs as well as the impressions, clicks, average ranking and clickthrough rate. The Countries summary shows you where in the world the daily impressions are being seen.
  • If you’re using social media to promote your business, then the Social information in Google Analytics will let you track which platforms are bringing traffic to your site. Are most of your visitors finding you through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or somewhere else altogether? Which URLs from your website are people sharing and talking about on social media? This is the place to look.

Understanding how visitors behave on your website

The Behaviour data in Google Analytics is really valuable in terms of understanding which pages on your website attract lots of visitors, where people come in, where they go and where they leave.

Behaviour dataYou can sort the Overview data by Page Views, Exit %, Average time on site, and more. This overview screen, which defaults to Page Views, will show you at a glance which were your ten most viewed pages during the selected time period. It would be sensible to check that the most viewed pages on the site contain information that is up-to-date and relevant.

  • The Site Content sections let you get up close and personal with how the different pages on your website are performing. Which get seen the most? Which have the highest bounce rates? Which bring the most traffic into your site? Which keep people reading? Which tend to be the exit pages? This information can all be found within the subheadings of this section of Google Analytics.
  • The page speeds of your website are important to the user experience. If certain pages, or your site as a whole, have a slow load time, you may find that visitors navigate away from the site to look for one that’s faster. The Site Speed reports will let you explore how your website is performing in terms of load speed. Click on Speed Suggestions to view the PageSpeed Insights from Google, what could do with fixing and how.
  • The Site Search report shows you how many people are using the search bar on your website to find content and what keywords they’re using to search.
  •  The Events reports show you how people use the interactive elements on your website, such as video players, games and other interactive experiences. When a player watches a video, for example, no page view is generated, so the Events data means this interaction still gets captured. Google provides an Events Tracking Guide to help you make the most of this feature

Tracking and measuring conversions in Google Analytics

So now we move to the final section of reports available in Google Analytics: the Conversions menu

the Conversions menuEssentially, a conversion is the completion of an activity on your site; this might be signing up to your ebook, downloading information, registering for a programme or filling out your contact form. You need to set up a Goal for each conversion you want to measure on your site. Google Analytics publishes a tutorial to walk you through the process of setting up goals.

The data under Goals lets you track how your goals are performing.

  • If you sell products or services online, then you can add a snippet of tracking code to track data such as product sales, purchase amounts and billing locations. The various reports in the E-commerce section enable you to segment and analyse your data, and discover relationships between your marketing campaigns, user engagement and transactions.
  • As Google Analytics explains, customers will typically visit your website multiple times before they actually buy from you, sign up or register. A potential customer may find your brand in an ad, on social media or through word of mouth referrals, visit your site to find out more, then finally return to buy from you. In fact, it’s estimated that people require between 7 and 27 touchpoints with a brand before they become customers.
  •  The data in the Multi-Channel Funnels section lets you analyse your customers’ conversions paths – in other words, the sequence of interactions that led to the goal conversions. This can help you make decisions about your advertising and marketing strategy.

Wrapping it all up

Google Analytics is a highly valuable tool for any business as it gives you tangible data that you can apply to grow your business and I hope that this guide has provided a good overview of Google Analytics, and how it can be used.

Filed Under: Analytics

A beginner’s guide to Google Search Console

September 20, 2019 By Hazel Jarrett 1 Comment

Updated September 2019

Google Search Console is a must-use tool if you want to track how your website is performing. You can keep an eye on keywords, page impressions, click-through rates, rankings, mobile usability, top linking sites and so much more.

It’s a fantastic companion to Google Analytics and completely free to use.

It can be a bit daunting to start with, which is why I’ve put together this beginner’s guide to the various reports and features to give you a handy starting point.

My big tip is to spend some time playing with the different features and filters in the Performance report (more about that below) to understand more about how you can use the data to boost your SEO efforts.

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console began its life as Google Webmaster Tools.

Essentially, it’s a free platform from Google that lets you see how the search engine views your website so that you’re better able to optimise your organic presence.

Using Google Search Console, you can tap into important information such as:

  • Queries/search terms used to find your site in search engine results pages (SERPs)
  • Average ranking position for keywords/phrases
  • Impressions and clicks for specific pages
  • Errors that need correcting
  • Top linked-to pages (internally and externally)
  • Which websites are linking to your site

On 9th September 2019, Google fully transferred to the ‘new’ interface for Google Search Console that it had been beta testing for two years and removed access to the old version.

This guide covers the new version.

 

How to add your website to Google Search Console

If you don’t have access to Google Search Console already, your first step is to set it up.

  1. Go to Google Search Console and click on Start now.
  2. Sign in using your Google account. If you have a personal and a business account, choose your business account. (If you don’t yet have a Google Account, hit the Create account option and follow the instructions).Sign Up Screen in Google Search Console
  3. You’ll be taken to the Google Search Console dashboard. Click on Add a property.
  4. On the Select property type pop-up that appears, you’ll be given the choice between adding a Domain or a URL prefix.

Select property type - Google Search Console

Google gives an explanation about what these two options mean that I’d recommend reading.

Essentially though, the Domain option covers all subdomains (e.g. www.example.com, blog.example.com, m.example.com) and protocols (i.e. http, https) associated with your website.

It’s a way of consolidating all of your data from your whole domain into one view.

Domain property graphic

The alternative – the URL prefix option – was the only method available in older versions of Google Search Console.

It only covers URLs under the entered address and specified protocol, e.g. https://www.example.com.

URL Prefix property graphic

If you use several subdomains and protocols, you would be better choosing Domain.


Please note: Currently, Google Analytics will only link to URL-Prefix properties.

My advice would be to set up a Domain property for your entire domain but also create a URL-Prefix property for your primary site URL and protocol, e.g. http://www.example.co.uk. This would be the primary version of the site that’s indexed with Google.


5. Click Continue.

6. As Google Search Console will give you access to confidential data about your website’s performance, you will need to pick a way to verify that you own the website you’re trying to add.

If you’ve chosen the Domain option, you will see the following pop-up:

Domain verification in Google Search Console

Follow the instructions given to verify your ownership of the domain.

If you’ve chosen the URL Prefix option, you will see a different verification screen:

URL verification

Pick your chosen verification method and follow the instructions given.

Google Search Console will start to collect and display data about your site as soon as it is verified.


Note: Google will let you re-add a web property that you’ve removed in the past without you having to go through a second verification process if the property still has one verified owner.

To re-add a website/domain, follow steps 1-5 above and you should be automatically re-verified.


Link Google Search Console with Google Analytics

As I mentioned above, Google Analytics will only link to URL-Prefix properties.

To link Google Search Console with Google Analytics you will need to complete the following steps:

  1. Log into Google Analytics
  2. Click on Admin, which you’ll find next to the gear symbol at the bottom of the main left-hand menu.
  3. Click on Property Settings in the menu under the name of the website to which you want to link Google Search Console (middle column).
  4. This menu will move to the left of the screen and a larger Property Settings panel will open – scroll down until you see the Adjust Search Console option. Click it.
  5. Click on Add.
  6. Scroll down until you find your website address. Tick the box and hit Save.

Your Google Search Console and Google Analytics should now be linked.

 

Creating a sitemap

Once your website is verified in Google Search Console, you should create and submit a site map, as this tells Google what pages you have on your website that you would like it to crawl.

There are lots of different ways to generate a site map.

If you have a WordPress site, you can create an XML sitemap using the fantastic Yoast WordPress SEO or a dedicated XML sitemap plugin, such as Google XML Sitemaps.

If you don’t have a WordPress site, Google offers advice about the different site map formats and general guidelines for building and submitting a site map.

Once you have generated a site map:

  1. Click on Sitemaps under the Index heading in the main Google Search Console menu to the left of the screen.
  2. Under Add a new sitemap, enter the URL for your sitemap.
  3. Click Submit.

 

Your Google Search Console Overview screen

Google Search Console Overview screen

On your Overview screen, you’ll notice that the main menu runs down the left-hand side.

There is also an at-a-glance view of:

  • How many web search clicks your website has had over the past three months (find out more with the Performance report – see below)
  • How many valid pages Google has currently indexed from your site and how many pages have errors (find out more with the Coverage report – see below)
  • Mobile usability problems (find out more with the Mobile Usability report – see below)
  • Which rich results Google found in your property, and whether or not they could be read (find out more with the Sitelinks Searchbox report – see below)

Let’s take a look at what the different options in the left-hand menu mean.

 

Performance

The Performance section of Google Search Console is where you can find incredibly valuable information about your website’s overall search performance in Google.

GSC Performance view

As you can see from the screenshot above, Performance gives you clear information about your website:

  • Total number of click-throughs from SERPs
  • Total number of impressions in SERPs (i.e. the number of times your pages showed up in search results)
  • Average click-through rate (CTR)
  • Average position in searches, overall and for each search term

You can view all four tabs together or select different combinations or single selections of the four tabs, depending on what data you want to view.

Dimensions and filters

In addition, Google Search Console lets you group your data by five different Dimensions:

  • Queries (see all the searches for which your web pages have ranked over the given time period)
  • Pages (see all the pages that have ranked in searches)
  • Countries (see where your audience is based by country)
  • Devices (see how your traffic is split across desktop, mobile devices and tablets, and whether the device on which SERPs are viewed influences your click-through rates)
  • Search Appearance (this will show up pages that contain rich snippets or Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) so you may not see many results listed here)

It’s also possible to filter in/out specific information to help you target specific information (I’ll be covering that in more detail below!)

The Performance report replaces the Search Analytics report in the older version of Google Search Console.

One of the most significant differences between the old and new reports is that you can now see a fantastic 16 months’ worth of data instead of just 90 days. This helps you to build up a longer-term view of how your keywords are performing.

 

Ways you can use the Performance report to boost your organic SEO

  • Identify your highest click-through rate queries

Click-through rate (CTR) is defined as the percentage of impressions that turn into click-throughs to your website.

CTR is an important metric to keep an eye on because it’s an indication of relevance between search terms and your content. Google is likely to view a high CTR as a positive ranking signal, especially if your CTR is higher than for other pages in the same SERP.

So, what are your highest CTR queries? Here’s how you can use Google Search Engine to find out:

  1. Click on Performance in the main menu.
  2. Click on the Queries tab below the graph (although the Performance page usually defaults to this view).
  3. Click on the Date display to the top-left of the graph and change the date range to Last 12 months (or whatever range you’d prefer) and then hit Apply.Performance date range
  4. Make sure the Average CTR tab is selected.Average CTR view
  5. On the line above the list of search queries, click on the arrow next to CTR to sort the results from highest to lowest. This will show you which of your search terms have the highest CTRs.

Of course, this information doesn’t give us the complete picture. A search term could have a 100% CTR but should you spend your energies on optimising that search term if it has only appeared once in a SERP?

To get a more complete understanding of your best performing search terms, click the Total Impressions tab too.

Which search terms stand out for having a high number of total impressions and a high CTR?


Note: If you’re wondering what makes a good CTR, a good starting point is the Advanced Web Ranking CTR Study. This regularly updated chart shows the organic click-through rates for searches coming from over 2.8 million keywords for 53,000+ websites.

This chart shows that CTRs are directly influenced by ranking position.


A further helpful step here can be to highlight the Average Position tab too. Make a note of search terms that have high impressions, high CTR but rank in position 5 or below in SERPs (i.e. halfway down page one and lower).

You could try building targeted content around these search terms to attract more traffic for these queries and boost them up to the top half of page one.

  • Find pages with a low click-through rate

It can be a red flag if you are getting loads of impressions for a search term but the click-through rate is low. This can be a sign that you need to revise your meta title and description, for example, to grab attention and show searchers/Google that your content is relevant to particular search terms.

With this in mind, Google Search Console can help you to pinpoint where you need to improve click-through rates.

Try the following:

    1. Click on the Average CTR and Average PositionPerformance low CTR
    2. We want to find the pages that rank at number five on Google or lower (the bottom half of page one) and have a bad CTR. This means that we need to filter out higher ranking pages that have an average position of 1-4 in SERPs.
    3. To do this, you will need to click on the Filter button to the top right of the list of search terms (and below the graph) and tick Position checkbox.Position check box
    4. This will bring up a new line above the list of search terms where you’ll see the word Equals next to a small triangle indicating the presence of a dropdown menu.Click to view the dropdown menu and click on Greater than.Type 4.9 in the Filter by Position space. This will filter the results so you only see pages with an average ranking position of 5 or lower.Filter results in GSC
    5. At the time of writing, the latest Advanced Web Ranking Click-through Rate Study figures show that websites ranking in position 5 on Google should have a CTR of 7.5% for mobile searches and 4.17% for desktop searches. We can use 4.17% as our baseline.This means we will need to filter the list of search terms further so we find those that have a CTR lower than 4.17%.Click on the Filter icon again and check the CTR boxfilter by CTR
    6. Now go back to the dropdown menu where it says Equals and choose Smaller than. Type 4.17 in the Filter by Position boxYou now have a list of low ranking search terms with low CTRs
    7. Now click on the Total Impressions and Average Clicks tabs as these will show you how many times your low ranking/low CTR pages have been seen in SERPs and searchers have clicked through to your site.
      Performance low CTR
      In the example image above, the highlighted line stands out. The search term has been seen 1,169 times and yet there have only been 29 click-throughs.
    8. We need to take this line of investigation further by understanding which pages are showing up in SERPs for the search term with the low CTR.To do this, click on the individual search query that you want to explore. This will isolate all the data to that particular search term.
    9. Click on the Pages tabGSC Pages tab
      This will give you the page or a list of pages on your website that rank in response to the search term.From this information, you can add to the picture you’re building about specific keywords and pages. For example, do you have lots of pages all ranking – and competing – for the same keyword?But the picture still isn’t complete.
    10. It could be that a page on your website has a low CTR for the search term you initially identified but that it ranks better and has a much higher CTR for a different search term.There’s no point optimising to improve the CTR for a keyword if it might negatively affect keywords that are already performing well for the page in question.To check this out, go to the top of the screen and click on New then Page and enter the URL for the page you want to investigate:GSC Performance low CTR
      You’ve now got a list of all the keywords the page ranks for. Which of the keywords have the best CTR? Which have the highest number of impressions? Depending on what you see, you might decide to tweak the page in question and its meta data to optimise it for the greatest amount of search traffic.One of your priorities should be to make the meta title and meta description as enticing as possible.Remember, these are what people see in search results. They need to act as a compelling call to action, encouraging searchers to click through to your website.
    11. Monitor the results! Having tweaked your meta data and optimised your low CTR pages, it may take a few days for Google to recrawl the updated content.Check into Google Search Console regularly over the next couple of weeks to see if the CTR improves
  • Identify your highest-traffic queries

Google Search Console can also help you identify which keywords bring the most search traffic to your website.

To find this data:

  1. Go to the Performance
  2. Click on the Query tab if it’s not your default view.
  3. Click on the Date range button to choose the time period you want to view (e.g. last 28 days)
  4. Make sure the Total Clicks tab is the only one selected in graph at the top of the screen. This relates to the actual number of searchers who clicked through to your website from a Google search, i.e. the total number of visitors arriving on your website from an organic search.
  5. Click on the small downward arrow next to Clicks to sort from the highest to the lowest.
  6. Click on each high performing search term and then the Pages tab to see which pages are ranking for the term.

You can use this information in a number of ways:

  • Optimise the ranking pages for conversion (e.g. more bookings or sales)
  • To update the ranking pages so that they maintain their position
  • To support the page with paid promotions such as Google or Facebook ads
  • Using them to link to low-ranked but relevant pages

 

  • Track ranking increases and decreases

Once you have implemented SEO changes to increase CTRs, for example, you will want to keep an eye on whether your rankings are going up or down for your target keywords.

Google Search Console helps us with this:

  • Go to the Performance
  • Click on the Queries tab if it isn’t your default view.
  • Click on the Date option to the top-left of the Performance graph and then choose the Compare tabGSC - Date compare
  • Select to compare two equivalent date periods (e.g. Compare last 3 months to previous period) and then hit Apply.
  • This data will show whether your average clicks, total impressions, average CTR and average impressions have gone up or down between this period and the previous one.At this stage, you can view the data in Google Search Console or export it as a CSV file or to Google Sheets. To export the data, click on the Export/Download icon and choose how to want to save the data.GSC Export button
  • For a view of ranking changes in Google Search Console, make sure that you only have the Average Position tab selected. This will bring up three columns of data – Last XX days/months position, Previous XX days/months position, Difference.Slightly confusingly, the lines with a negative difference (e.g. -0.9) represent an increase in rankings between the last and previous periods, whereas the lines with a positive difference represent a decrease in rankings.
    You can see some examples of this in the screenshot below:

Average rankings difference

If there are some significant increases or decreases between this period and the last, you may need to investigate the cause.

Sometimes, you’ll notice a big variation because the search wasn’t made during the previous period. This will be indicated with a 0 in the relevant column. It could be that this is the first period during which your site has ranked for a search term, in which case you won’t need to worry about the increase or decrease.

My advice here is to begin building up a picture month-on-month of your highest ranking keywords. If you suddenly notice a nosedive for a usually productive search term then you will want to explore this further.

  • Are your competitors targeting the same term?
  • When did you last update/refresh your content?
  • Could you have been hit with a Google penalty?

These are all questions you might want to consider.

  • Find ‘Opportunity’ keywords

You can use the Performance data to find keywords that rank between positions 8-20 in SERPs and get a good number of impressions. These are sometimes referred to as ‘Opportunity keywords’, i.e. words and phrases that reveal an opportunity to rank highly in SERPs.

With ‘Opportunity’ keywords, you should already have a page that is ranking well for the search term. With a little care and attention, you could boost the relevance of the page and bump up its rankings.

But how do you find ‘Opportunity’ keyword?

  1. Set the date range of the date to the Last 28 days.
  2. Filter the report to show keywords ranking Greater than 7.9 (this will show everything ranked from position 8 and below).
  3. Sort by Impressions (largest to smallest) and look for key phrases with a good number of impressions and a ranking average somewhere between 8 and 20.
  4. See which page ranks for this keyword by clicking on the search query and choosing the Pages tab

Once you’ve identified the pages you could improve to see a quick increase in rankings, you’ll want to turn your attention to the page in question.

  • Look at ways to add more detail by covering as much as you can about the topic.
  • Add in a video to keep people viewing the page for longer.
  • Provide step-by-step instructions.
  • Link to connected content.
  • Share on social media and build backlinks to the updated page.

As we can see, the potential within the Performance report is MASSIVE!

 

URL Inspection

Next in the main menu to the left-hand side of the screen is the URL Inspection tool.

You can look at individual URLs on your website to:

  • Check the current index status of the URL
  • Determine whether a specific URL can be indexed
  • Request that Google crawls – or recrawls – a page
  • View how Googlebots see a page
  • View a loaded resources list, JavaScript output and page code

Note: This isn’t a live test. Instead, this tool gives us a view of the most recently indexed version of the URL. To test the live version of the page, you will need to click on the Test Live URL button to the top right of the screen.


To check a URL, simply:

    1. Click on URL Inspection in the main menu.
    2. Enter the URL you want to inspect in the search box at the top of the screen.
    3. Review the results.

URL Inspection

You’ll notice that the Coverage, Mobile Usability and Sitelinks searchbox sections each have a little arrow to the right on them. Click on these to expand the section for more information.

Within these boxes, you can see when a URL was last crawled by Google and whether it was crawled as a Googlebot smartphone or desktop, for example.

You can check out the user-selected canonical URL and whether this matches the Google-selected canonical (a great way to hunt out duplicate content!)

The URL Inspection tool will also flag up errors such as:

  • Problems with the page’s coding, structure, rich snippets, etc.
  • Page can’t be indexed
  • There is a duplicate version of a canonical page
  • The content is password protected or has a noindex tag

When problems are indicated, Google Search Console will give you appropriate information about how to fix the errors.

 

Index>Coverage

Click on the Index>Coverage option in the main left-hand menu.

This report shows the indexing state of all URLs that Google has visited – or tried to visit – in your web property.

The summary page groups the results by status (error, warning, or valid) and the specific reason for that status, such as Submitted URL has crawl issue or Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’.

Coverage summary

Click on the Error row you want to investigate for a list of all of the URLs affected by the same error.

You’ll notice on the screenshot above that you can sort the Coverage summary screen by four different tabs, which show the following:

  1. Error: URLs that haven’t been indexed because of an error.
    (If you’re not sure how to fix a particular error, click on the Help question mark icon to the top right-hand side of the screen and Google Search Console will bring up a list of errors and their probable solutions).
    You may want to give these pages your attention straight away.
  2. Valid with warnings: These are pages that Google may or may not have indexed, depending on specific factors. For example, the page may have been indexed while being blocked by robots.txt. Google may not be sure whether it was your intention to block the page so flags it up with a warning.Any URLs in this category will need your attention.
  3. Valid: These are URLs that have been submitted to Google and indexed with no problems.
  4. Excluded: URLs that Google feels it shouldn’t index. This could cover pages with a ‘noindex’ tag, Not found (404) URLs, pages with redirects, duplicate of a page with a proper canonical tag, and many others.Again, you can click on the row that gives the reason for exclusion to see what URLs fall under that heading.

Note: Google Search Console highlights that you probably won’t need to use the Coverage report if your website has fewer than 500 pages. It says it’s far simpler, in the case of smaller sites, to search for your site on Google by entering site:example.co.uk, where example.co.uk is your site’s homepage URL without the http:// or https:// prefix.

For example, I would enter site:seo-plus.co.uk

The search results show pages that Google knows about on your site. You can add search terms to find specific pages on your site – for example, I could enter site:seo-plus.co.uk local SEO to bring up all of the indexed pages about local SEO.


Index>Sitemaps

This report shows sitemaps that you have submitted to Google for indexing related to the current web property.

You can submit image, video and news URLs in your sitemap but the Sitemaps report doesn’t currently show any data for those types of URLs.

I covered how to create and submit a sitemap earlier in the guide.

The report will tell you whether or not sure sitemap was read and processed successfully or whether there were any problems that require your attention.

Click on the Help question mark icon to the top right-hand side of the screen while you’re in the Sitemaps report for a helpful guide to troubleshooting common sitemap problems.

Enhancements>Mobile Usability

The Mobile Usability report shows which pages on your website have problems when viewed on mobile devices.

Mobile Usability report

As we can see from the above screenshot, Google will either mark a crawled page as having an Error or being Valid, based on an internal mobile usability score. If a URL has multiple errors, you should notice that it’s listed under each error type that affects it.

To see which pages you need to look at to fix an error, click on the Error row in the Details list (see the screenshot above) and you’ll get a list of every URL with the same error.

Pages that are listed as Valid have met the minimum mobile usability score set by Google. They may still have some mobile usability issues but not enough to flag up in this report. To double-check for more minor issues, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

If you have a large number of pages with mobile usability errors, Google recommends that you fix them in the default order given in the report (i.e. most common causes first).

If yours is a very big website, it’s worth noting that Google will only list the first 1,000 pages found to have the same error in the Details list; other pages may also have errors.

Once you have fixed a mobile usability error on a page, you should return to the error listing and click on the Validate fix button. Google will then recrawl the page and change its status to Valid if it meets the minimum mobile usability score.

Validate fix

Enhancements>Sitelinks searchbox

If you have rich results or structured data markup (see my Schema Made Easy Guide) on your website, this report will help you to troubleshoot any errors in how Google sees and processes this information.

Sitelinks searchbox

As with the Coverage and Mobile Usability reports, errors are shown in red, valid with warnings in amber and valid pages in green.

Some people find that they’re unable to see this report. There can be a number of reasons for this.

At the time of writing, Google only provides reports for 11 types of rich data: datasets, events, FAQs, fact check, how-to, job posting, logo, product, Q&A page, recipe, and sitelinks searchbox. It could be that your rich data is not currently supported.

Google can only look at rich data on crawled pages and doesn’t support this report in every location yet.

If you think Google Search Console is missing your rich data, you can use the Rich Results Test Tool (currently in beta testing) to see the rich result code.

Again, Google Search Console’s Help feature has some great pointers for troubleshooting if you do have errors highlighted within this report.

Security & Manual Actions>Manual Actions

Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has found something on the site that they consider to breach Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. This is often where ‘black hat’ SEO techniques attempting to ‘game’ Google’s rankings will show up.

If your website has been hit by a penalty and you’ve noticed a sudden drop in rankings (or a page has completely disappeared from searches), this is the report to check first.

If you do have manual actions against your site, they will be listed in this report with details of the affected URLs. Google will expect you to fix the highlighted issues on all affected pages, not just a selection, before you see an improvement in your rankings moving forward.

When all of the issues have been fixed on all pages, you can select to Request Review. Google says that in your Reconsideration Request, you should:

  • Explain the exact quality issue on your site
  • Describe the steps you’ve taken to fix the issue
  • Document the outcome of your efforts

You should receive an email to confirm that your Reconsideration Request has been received but it may take one or two weeks before the review is complete.

Common manual actions include:

  • Thin content
  • Unnatural links to/from your site
  • User-generated spam
  • Cloaked text or images
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Sneaky redirects

 

Security & Manual Actions>Security Issues

The security issues report will flag up if your web property has been hacked in some way. This can include types of malware, content or code injections, or social engineering (phishing) scams that attempt to trick web users into doing something dangerous, such as revealing confidential information or downloading harmful software.

As with the other reports, Google Search Console will walk you through the steps you need to take if any issues are flagged up. This could include checking third-party resources on your site, removing content or following the hacking recovery process.

 

Legacy tools & reports

Google Search Console’s legacy tools and reports are those that don’t yet have a full replacement in the new search console. Google says its Search Console team is “working on a replacement strategy for these items”.

For the time being, the following legacy tools and reports are available:

  • International Targeting

If you have a website that can be viewed in multiple languages then the International Targeting report will monitor your hreflang errors or enable you to choose a country that should be prioritised in your search results.

I found a good guide to this tool at Direct Online Marketing.

  • Removals

The URL Removal tool is intended as a first step for content that you urgently need blocked from Google searches — for example, if it contains confidential data that was accidentally exposed.

Using the tool for other purposes might cause problems for your site.

Google says that if your site has been hacked, you should only use the URL Removal tool to block URLs the hacker may have added to your site. You shouldn’t use the tool to take your site offline while you clean up the hacking.

You can find more information about the URL Removal tool in the Search Console help.

  • Crawl Stats

The Crawl Stats report provides information on Googlebot’s activity on your site for the last 90 days, taking into account all of the content types that Google downloads (e.g. CSS, JavaScript, Flash, images, and PDF files).

Generally speaking, the graphs should look fairly level over the 90 days with minor peaks and troughs. If you add more content to your site, you would expect the graph levels to increase.

If you notice a sudden, significant drop in crawl rates across the three charts, you may need to investigate further.

Have you added any fresh content recently? Google crawls unchanging sites less frequently than regularly updated sites.

Have you added a new robots.txt rule that is blocking your content from being crawled?

Do you have image-only pages? Google will not crawl these.

If you’ve recently added a new sitemap for Google to crawl, you may notice a swift spike in crawl rate.

  • Messages

Here, Google Search Console will flag up any reports you might want to look at or send messages about features and tools available to you.

  • URL Parameters

URL parameters are most commonly used on e-commerce sites where there are multiple pages for very similar products, e.g.

  • https://example.com/products/women/dresses/green.html
  • https://example.com/products/women?category=dresses&color=green
  • https://example.com/products/women/dresses/green.html?limit=20&sessionid=123

This tool reduces the crawling of duplicate URLs but it should only be used if you know how URL Parameters work. Incorrectly excluding URLs can cause them to disappear from searches.

  • Web Tools

This link will take you through to a number of Google’s Web Tools such as:

  • Structured Data Testing Tool
  • Structured Data Markup Helper
  • PageSpeed Insights
  • Google My Business
  • And many more!

 

Links

This report gives you an at-a-glance view of:

  • Your most linked to web pages from external sources
  • Your most linked to web pages from internal links
  • The top linking sites to your content
  • The text people use to link to your site

If you spot that one page is attracting a lot of backlinks, you can click on the URL to see all of the websites linking back to it.

This is a great way of building up a picture of who’s connecting with your content and sharing it with their own communities.

The information you gather from this report can help you identify guest blogging opportunities, influencers in your sector, content that you might want to link to, similar audiences and much more.

The report can also help you spot spammy links back to your site, which can sometimes be the cause of a manual action (see above) being logged. If you do find spammy backlinks, you could ask the publisher to remove them or disavow the links.

With the internal links information, you can build up a better view of how your content is connected across your site.

Are there pages that you link to regularly? This could be your cornerstone content, i.e. the pillars on which your website is built. If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, it has a feature that allows you to mark cornerstone content for Google. This is a way of telling Google which content is evergreen, in-depth and important to your audience.

 

Settings

Finally, the Settings feature will just let you check that your web property has been verified. You can also check approved users/owners and learn more about the indexing crawler for your domain.

 

Now, over to you.

Are you a longstanding user of Google Search Console or has this guide inspired you to give it a go?

Which Performance report do you plan to look at first? Or are you more interested in who’s linking to your site? Do you have errors that need fixing? Have you identified good keywords to target?

Leave a Comment to let me know.

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Filed Under: Analytics Tagged With: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Tools Guide, GWT, SEO Tips

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