Websites are popular channels for relaying and collecting information. Individuals, businesses, and organizations use websites to tell the public who they are and what they do. Websites also serve as a way of collecting data from users through contact forms. E-commerce platforms like Amazon use websites to sell products to their customers. This is where Google Search Analytics comes into the picture.
This will help you ensure that your website can be found by your target audience. It can also help you identify any issues with your website and fix them early in advance. Thanks to Google Search Console, a tool developed by Google to help you improve your website’s presence on Google Search Results. This article will discuss how to work with Google Search Analytics Reports in Google Search Console.
Prerequisites
This is what you need for this article:
- A Google Account.
- A Hosted Website.
Understanding Google Search Console
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Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting the presence of a website on Google Search Results. You must not sign up for Search Console to be added to Google Search Results, but Search Console can help you to understand and improve the way Google sees your website.
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Google Search Console provides Reports and tools for the following:
- Confirming that Google can find your website.
- Fixing indexing problems and requesting re-indexing of new and updated content.
- Showing you the websites that link to your website.
- Viewing Google Search Traffic data about your website, that is, how often your website shows up in Search Results, the Search Queries that show your website, and more.
- Receiving alerts when Google encounters spam, indexing, and other problems on your website.
- Troubleshooting issues to do with mobile usability, AMP, and other search features.
For further information on Google Search Console, visit the official website here.
Understanding Google Search Analytics Reports in GSC
The Google Search Analytics Report helps you know the performance of your website on Search Results. The Google Search Analytics Report enables you to group and filter data by page, Search Query, or device on the Google Search Console. The Report can also show you how the Search Traffic changes over time, Click-Through rates for pages, and Search Queries made by a device.
Let’s discuss the different parts of the Search Console’s Google Search Analytics Report:
1) Performance Report
This Report shows 16-month data for your website including impressions, Click-Through rate, position, and top keywords. You can use this Report to improve the regular Web Analytics for your website.
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The numbers shown in Analytics and Performance will not be similar, but they should show similar trends. However, if the two show a significant difference, check the Google Analytics tags to ensure that they are firing correctly.
2) URL Inspection Report
This is one of the favorite parts of the Google Search Analytics Report because it helps you know how Google views your website. This way, you can know how Google displays your website. After redesigning a webpage or submitting a new post, you can use this tool to submit the URL and ask Google to crawl the page. It returns a Report like the one given below:
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This is how you can inspect and analyse your Website URLs using the Google Search Analytics Report.
3) Links Report
This Links Report is divided into two sections, the Internal and External Links sections, and it shows the links and pages that link to yours.
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The top Reports are marked as “Top Linked Pages”. The one under “External Links” shows the pages with the most links to them from the pages on the other domains. This means that it shows the pages that receive links from other websites. The ones under “Internal Links” show the top pages with internal links. This means that it shows the pages that receive links from the other pages on your website.
The “Top Linking Sites” section of the Google Search Analytics report shows the websites that link heavily to yours. The “Top Linking Text” shows the common text used by other websites to link to your website.
4) Coverage Report
This report gives information about the indexation of all URLs on your website, that is, the pages that Google can index as well as those it cannot and why. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins at indexation. If your website is not indexed, no optimization in the world will get you ranked.
The Coverage Google Search Analytics Report shows information about crawl blockers and common errors, like redirect errors, soft 404s, and the pages blocked by robots.txt.
5) Mobile Usability Report
The purpose of this report is to help you improve the user experience on Mobile Searches. It helps you identify common problems on your websites like the placement of clickable elements and screen width.
Your website may be responsive, but it will be good for you to pay attention to this Report. Note that it is not how easy and usable you think your website is that will give you a better ranking. Leave it to Google and you won’t regret it. The reason is that Google uses an algorithm to evaluate this.
Limitations of Google Search Analytics Report in GSC
The following are the limitations of using Google Search Analytics Reports in Google Search Console:
- Not effective for low Search Volumes. The reason is that it only Reports data after it has reached a particular threshold.
- It doesn’t identify and Report any security issues with your website.
- It doesn’t give suggestions on how to make improvements to your website.
- Data takes some time to come through.
Conclusion
In this article, you’ve learned about Google Search Console and how to work with Google Search Analytics Report in Google Search Console.
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Nicholas Samuel is a technical writing specialist with a passion for data, having more than 14+ years of experience in the field. With his skills in data analysis, data visualization, and business intelligence, he has delivered over 200 blogs. In his early years as a systems software developer at Airtel Kenya, he developed applications, using Java, Android platform, and web applications with PHP. He also performed Oracle database backups, recovery operations, and performance tuning. Nicholas was also involved in projects that demanded in-depth knowledge of Unix system administration, specifically with HP-UX servers. Through his writing, he intends to share the hands-on experience he gained to make the lives of data practitioners better.
