Updated – August 2020
Google Analytics and Search Console are free tools provided by Google. They are used when a website owner wants to do SEO or online promotion of his site.
Google Analytics is a tool that is used to analyze the performance of the website by tracking the types and quantity of traffic.
Google launched its analytics tool in November 2005 with some basic features. However, they have been updating tools from time to time.
Nowadays, Google Analytics has many features. Any verified user can see the custom traffic on the website for a particular day, week, or time period. He can also compare the traffic between two time periods.
Analytics is a great tool to monitor live traffic on your website. A user can see the conversions attained by the website within a time period. A report can also be downloaded which shows various stats as per user’s requirement.
This tool also gives the facility to monitor the live traffic on the website, which can be differentiated on the basis of traffic source, location, and the landing page. The unique benefits of using the Google Analytics tool are gathered below:
- Tracks audience demographics– this feature helps you understand your audience. Who are they? Where do they come from? When you meet your users, you can target your content better, and consequently, perform better.
- Where does the traffic come from? Using this tool, you can check on particular components of your marketing. For example, with the insight into your traffic sources, you can see whether your newsletters bring any benefits.
- Watch the performance of specific pages of the site– this is another sign on the road that Google Analytics offers. When you look at what pages are enjoying most of the traffic, you can see where to invest more of the time or skill.
- The time users spend on the page– When you are building the trustworthy circle of customers, the amount of time each user spends on your page is a crucial indicator.
To set up Google Analytics for a Website, follow these steps
- First, you need to create a Gmail account.
- After getting a Gmail account, just open the URL: https://www.google.com/analytics/
- Click on the Sign In button available on the right corner, and add your property (website).
- Select your time zone, country and put the complete URL of the website.
- After submission, this tool gives a unique “.js-tracking code”, which needs to be pasted on the head section of every page of the website.
By following all the steps, you can successfully set up the Google Analytics Tool for your website.
Google Search Console
his is a tool that is used to instruct a website on how to perform on Google search results.
You can submit a sitemap of your website in search console so that Google can understand which path needs to follow while crawling the website. Click here to learn about the crawling process, https://www.google.com/intl/bn/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html
There is also a feature to test robots.txt file which is used to define search engine what to crawl.
What does Google Search Console offer?
- It shows accurate analytics- For everyone concentrating on marketing or simply improving their page, analytics is a vital tool. It tells you a lot about impressions, clicks, position, etc.
- Links! SEO validates you based on the links. Therefore, by using Google Search Console you can check on your site’s internal and external links quality and quantity.
You need to add all types of property for your site
Every site has at least 4 properties, http://www.example.com/, https://www.example.com/, http:// example.com/, https:// example.com/. After adding all of these, you can select which one is the preferred URL to show in SERP.
Features of the Search Console
- Before submitting a sitemap, you can check if there is an error.
- You can check and set the crawl rate for your site.
- You can check the robots.txt file which can help you to discover those pages that are blocked accidentally.
- Check the list of internal and external links to the site.
- You can also check the crawl errors which are generated when Google-bot finds any difficulty to crawl a webpage.
- This tool also shows the impressions, CTR, search queries, and their position in SERP.
- If your website gets hit by a manual penalty, you will get notified in the “manual action” section of the tool. Read here about Google penalties: https://www.seoliquido.com/what-are-algorithmic-and-manual-penalties-of-google/
- Check the security issues with the website. (Hacked Site or Malware Attacks).
- You can also inform Google about the new page of your site, and can apply to index that page.
- You can also select your targeted country.
If you want to set up the Search Console for your website, follow these steps:
- First, you need to create a Gmail account.
- After getting a Gmail account, just open the URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/
- Click on the Sign In button available on the right corner, and add your property (website).
- After adding your property, you need to verify it, there are four ways to verify, two are them are easiest ways. You can either paste the unique search console code into the head section of every page or verify your property by selecting “verification through Google Analytics”.
- In order to verify with analytics tool, you need to sign in through the same account.
Once followed above steps, you are ready to go.