Google Search Console and Google Analytics introduction


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Overview

This article is about the basics of Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These are the basic and free tools to optimize your Website for search engines and for your Website visitors.

What is Google Search Console (GSC)

Google Search Console and Google Analytics - GSC
GSC reports how the Google search engine is interacting with your Website.

GSC offers a lot of tools with which you can improve the visibility of a Website and fix technical problems. Using GSC won’t help your Website get preferential treatment. However, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your Website perform better in search results.

Google Search Console gives you useful information, such as :

Search Appearance – section

HTML Improvements
GSC inform you if Google detects any HTML errors on the Website.

Search Traffic – section

Search Analytics
Search Analytics shows current and average keyword rankings, as well as organic search impressions and the click-through rate (CTR) for each keyword.

Links to Your Site
Shows how many links are pointing to your Website from other Websites.

Crawl – section

Crawl Errors
GSC gives you information about the pages which Google is unable to crawl. This is a very important aspect because if Google cannot crawl your Webpages, your search engine visibility may go down. With the help of this tool, you can find out issues and resolve them.

Fetch as Google
You can use GSC to submit a Website or a single Webpage to Google. However, Google doesn’t guarantee that they will index every URL they crawl.

robots.txt Tester
If your Website has content you don’t want Google or other search engines to access, use a robots.txt file to specify how search engines should crawl your Website’s content. You can use GSC to find out if your robots.txt is working as expected.

Security Issues – section
GSC informs you if Google detects any malware on a Website.

Google Search Console Help

What is Google Analytics (GA)

Google Analytics is showing how users are interacting with your Website.

GA tracks only from users who have JavaScript enabled in their browser and Webpages which include the correctly configured Google Analytics Javascript code.

Google Analytics has the advantage of cross integration with other Google products such as Google Search Console, AdWords, and AdSense. Google offers another tool called “Content Experiments” that allows you to run experiments to find what on-page changes will produce the best conversion rates with visitors.

If you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your Website using Google Search Console or other services, you’re probably curious about the traffic coming to your Website. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this.
You can basically :

– get insight into how users reach and behave on your Website
– discover the most popular content on your Website
– measure the impact of optimizations you make to your Website

GA will give you information, such as :

Visitor Reports
The total number of visitors your Website has. It also specifies what are the number of new visitors and returning visitors
The time that your visitors spend on your Website
The amount of Webpages your visitors view
The amount of visitors who landed on your Website and left immediately
Geographical location of your Website visitors
The Websites which referred visitors to your Website

Web traffic Reports
Total number of of people visiting your Website on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. It also provides your traffic stats to previous years.

Details of Keywords
The keywords which bring traffic to your Website
The keywords which produce most sales
The keywords which keep your visitors on your Website for longer durations

Content
The Webpages your visitors visit often
The Webpages that brings you more traffic
The Webpages from which your visitors leave your Website

Conversions
The conversion rates for the goals you set on your Website

Comparison of Google Search Console and Google Analytics

GA is showing how users are interacting with your Website, while GSC reports how the Google search engine is interacting with your Website.

Data from GSC shows you how to optimize your Website for the Google search engine, on the other hand GA data shows you how to optimize your Website for better user interactions.

GA gives you a lot of information in the sections : Audience, Acquisition and Behavior, this is much more than GSC gives you in the section Search Analytics.

Google Search Console data may differ slightly from the data displayed in other tools, such as Google Analytics.
Possible reasons for this include:

  • Some tools, such as Google Analytics, track traffic only from users who have enabled JavaScript in their browser.
  • Some processing of the source data may cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources. However, these changes should not be significant.
  • Some tools define “keywords” differently. For example, the Keywords tool in Google AdWords displays the total number of Google searches for that keyword across the Web. The Google Search Console “Search Analytics” page, however, shows how many of those keyword searches returned your pages in Google search results, and this is a smaller number.
  • There may be a delay between the calculated and the visible numbers in GSC. Although data gets published in intervals, Google is continually collecting it. Normally, data should be available in 2-3 days.

Google Analytics Help

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