In this article by Michael David, author of the book WordPress Search Engine Optimization, you will learn about Google Analytics and Google Webmaster/Search Console. Once you have built your website and started promoting it, you’ll want to monitor your progress to ensure that your hard work is yielding both high rankings, search engine visibility, and web traffic. In this article, we’ll cover a range of tools with which you will monitor the quality of your website, learn how search spiders interact with your site, measure your rankings in search engines for various keywords, and analyze how your visitors behave, when they are on your site. With this information, you can gauge your progress and make adjustments to your strategy.
(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)
Obviously, you’ll want to know where your web traffic is coming from, what search terms are being used to find your website, and where you are ranking in the search engines for each of these terms. This information will allow you to see what you still need to work on, in terms of building links to the pages on your website.
There are five main tools you will use to analyze your site and evaluate your traffic and rankings, and in this article, we will cover each in turn. They are Google Analytics, Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools), HTML Validator, Bing Webmaster, and Link Assistant’s Rank Tracker. As an alternative to Bing Webmaster, you may also want to employ Majestic SEO to check your backlinks. We’ll cover each of these tools in turn.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics monitors and analyzes your website’s traffic. With this tool, you can see how many website visitors you have had, whether they found your site through the search engines or clicked through from another website, how these visitors behaved once they were on your site, and much more. You can even connect your Google AdSense account to one or more of the domains you are monitoring in Google Analytics, to get information about which pages and keywords generate the most income. While there are other analytics services available, none match the scope and scale of what Google Analytics offers.
Setting up Google Analytics for your website
To set up Google Analytics for your website, perform the following steps:
- To sign up for Google Analytics, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/.
- On the top-right corner of the page, you’ll see a button that says, Sign In to Google Analytics. You’ll need to have a Google account before signing in.
- You will have to click Sign up on the next page if you haven’t already, and on the next page you’ll enter your website’s URL and time zone.
If you have more than one website, just start with one. You can add the other sites later. The account name you use is not important, but you can add all of your sites to one account, so you might want to use something generic like your name or your business name.
- Select the time zone country and time zone, and then click on Continue.
- Enter your name and country, and click on Continue again. Then you will need to accept the Google Analytics terms of service.
After you have accepted the terms, you will be given a snippet of HTML code, that you’ll need to insert into the pages of your website. The snippet will look like the following:
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-xxxxxx-x', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');</script>The code must be placed just before the closing head tag in each page on your website. There are several ways to install the code. Check first to see, if your WordPress template offers a field to insert the code in the template admin area—most modern templates offer this feature. If not, you can insert the code manually just before the closing the </head> tag, which you will find in the file called header.php within your WordPress template files. There is yet a third way to do this, if you don’t want to tinker with your WordPress code. You can download and install one of the many WordPress analytics plugins. Two sound choices for an analytics plugin would be Google Analyticator or Google Analytics by Yoast; both the plugins are available at WordPress.org.
If you have more than one website, you can add more websites within your analytics account. Personally, I like to keep one website per analytics account just to keep things neat, but some like to have all their websites under one analytics account.
To add a second or third website to an analytics account, navigate to Admin on the top menu bar, and then pull down the menu under Account in the left column, and then click Create a New Account.
When you are done adding websites, click Home on the top menu bar to navigate to the main analytics page.
From here, you can select a web property. This is the screen that greets you when you log in to Google Analytics, the Audience Overview report. It offers an effective quick look at how your website is performing.
Using Google Analytics
Once you have installed Google Analytics on your websites, you’ll need to wait a few weeks, or perhaps longer, for Analytics to collect enough data from your websites to be useful. Remember that with website analytics, like any type of statistical analysis, larger sets of data reveal more accurate and useful information. It may not take that long if you have a high-traffic site, but if you have a fairly new site that doesn’t get a lot of traffic, it will take some time, so come back in a few weeks to a month to check to see how your sites are doing.
The Audience Overview report is your default report, displayed to you, when you first log into analytics and gives you a quick overview of each site’s traffic.
You can see at a glance, whether the tracking code is receiving data, how many visits (sessions) your website has gotten in the past 30 days, the average time visitors stay on your site (session duration), your bounce rate (the percentage of users that come to visit your site and leave without visiting another page), and the percentage of new sessions (users that haven’t visited before) in the past 30 days.
The data displayed on the dashboard is just a small taste of what you can learn from Google Analytics. To drill down to more detailed information, you’ll navigate to other sections of analytics using the left menu. Your main report areas in analytics are Audience (who your visitors are), Acquisition (how your visitors found your site), Behavior (what your visitors did on your site), and Conversions (did they make a purchase or complete a contact form).
Within any of the main report areas, are a dozens of available reports. Google Analytics can offer you tremendous detail on almost any imaginable metric related to your website. Most of your time, however, is best spent with a few key reports.
Understanding key analytics reports
Your key analytics reports will be the Audience Overview, Acquisition Overview, and the Behavior Overview. You access each of these reports by navigating to the left menu area and each corresponding overview report is the first link in each list.
The Audience Overview report is your default report, discussed earlier.
The Acquisition Overview report drills down into how your visitors are finding your site, whether it is through organic search, pay per click programs, social media, or referrals from other websites. These different pathways by which customers find your site are referred to as channels or mediums on other reports, but mean essentially the same thing. The Acquisition Overview report also shows some very basic conversion data, although the reports in the Conversions section offer much more meaningful conversion data. The following screenshot is an Acquisition Overview report:
Why is the Acquisition Overview report important? It shows us the relative strength of our inbound channels. In the case above, organic search is delivering the highest number of users. This tells us that we are getting most of our users from the organic search results—our organic campaign is running strong. Referrals generated 384 visits, which means we’ve got good links delivering traffic. Our 369 direct visitors don’t come from other websites, it’s a fresh browser page where users type our URL directly or follow a bookmark they’ve saved. That is a welcome figure, because it means we’ve got strong brand and name recognition and in the conversions column on the right side of the table, we can see that our direct traffic generated a measurable conversion rate. That’s a positive sign that our brand recognition and reputation is strong.
The Behavior Overview report tells us how users behave once they visit our site. Are they bouncing immediately or viewing several pages? What content are they viewing the most? Here’s a sample Behavior Overview report:
Some information is repeated on the Behavior Overview report, such as Pageviews and Bounce Rate. What is important here is the table under the graph. This table shows you the relative popularity of your pages. This data is important because it shows you what content is generating the most user interest. As you can see from the table, the page titled /add-sidebar-wordpress generated over 1,000 pageviews, more than the home page, which is indicated in analytics by a single slash (/).
This table shows you your most popular content—these pages are your greatest success. And remember, you can click on any individual page and then see individual metrics for that page.
One way to maximize your site earnings is to focus on improving the performance of the pages that are already earning money. Chances are, you earn at least 80 percent of your income from the top 20 percent of the pages on your site. Focus on improving the rankings for those pages in order to get the best return for your efforts.
With any analytics report, by default the statistics shown will all be for the past month, but you can adjust the time period, by clicking on the down arrow next to the dates in the upper right hand corner.
Setting up automated analytics reports
You can also use Google Analytics to e-mail you daily, weekly, or monthly reports.
To enable this feature, simply navigate to the report that you’d like to be sent to you. Then, click the Email link just under the report title. The following pop-up will appear:
The Frequency field lets you determine how often the report is sent, or you can simply send the report one time.
Google Webmasters/Search Console
Now, we are going to go into a bit more detail, and show you how to use Google Webmaster Tools to obtain information that you can use to improve your website.
Understanding your website’s search queries
The Search Console now shows you data on what search queries users entered in Google search to find their way to your website. This is valuable: it teaches you what query terms are effectively delivering customers. To see the report, expand Search Traffic on the left navigation menu and select Search Analytics. The following report will display:
Examine the top queries that Search Console shows you are getting traffic for, and add them to your list of keywords to work on, if they are not already there. You will probably find that it is most beneficial to focus on those keywords, that are currently ranked between #4 and #10 in Google, to try to get them moved up to one of the top three spots.
You’ll also want to check for crawl errors on each of your sites while you work in the Search Console. A crawl error is an error that Google’s spider encounters, when trying to find pages on your site. A dead link, a link to a page on your site that no longer exists, is a common and perfect example of a crawl error.
Crawl errors are detrimental to rankings. First, crawl errors send a poor quality signal to search engines. Remember that, Google wants to deliver a great experience to users of its search engine and properties. Dead links and lost pages do not deliver a great experience to users.
To see the crawl error data, expand the Crawl link on the left navigation bar and then click Crawl Errors. The crawl error report will show you any pages that Google attempted to read but could not reach. Not all entries on this report are bad news. If you remove a piece of content that Google crawled in the past, Google will attempt for months to try to find that piece of content again. So, a removed page will generate a crawl error. Another way crawl errors get generated is if you have a sitemap file with page entries that no longer exist. Even inbound links from third party websites to pages that don’t exist, will generate crawl errors.
Other errors you find might be the result of a typo or the other error that involves going into a specific page on your website to fix. For example, perhaps you made a mistake typing in the URL when linking from one page to another, resulting in a 404 error. To fix that, you need to edit the page that the URL with the error was linked from and correct the URL.
Other errors might require editing the files for your template to fix multiple errors simultaneously. For example, if you see that the Googlebot is getting a 404 (page not found) error every time it attempts to crawl the comments feed for a post, then the template file probably doesn’t have the right format for creating those URLs. Once you correct the template file, all of the crawl errors related to that problem will be fixed.
There are other things you can do in Google Webmaster Tools, for example, you can check to see how many links to your site Google is detecting.
Checking your website’s code with a HTML Validator
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a coding standard with a reasonable degree of complexity. HTML standards develop over time, and a valid HTML code displays more websites more accurately in a wider range of browsers. Sites that have substantial amounts of HTML coding errors can potentially be punished by search engines. For this reason, you should periodically check your website for HTML coding errors.
There are two principal tools, that web professionals use to check the quality of their websites’ code: the W3C HTML Validator and the CSE HTML Validator.
The W3C HTML Validator (http://validator.w3.org) is the less robust of the two validators, but it is free. Both validators work in the same way; they examine the code on your website and issue a report advising you of any errors.
The CSE HTML Validator (http://htmlvalidator.com) is not a free tool, but you can get a free trial of the software that is good for 30 days or 200 validations, whichever comes first. This software catches errors in HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. It also checks your links, to ensure that they are all valid. It includes an accessibility checker, spell checker, and a SEO checker. With all of these functions, there is a good chance that if your website has any problems, the CSE HTML Validator will be able to find them.
After downloading and installing the demo version of CSE HTML Validator, you will be given the option to go to a page that contains two video demos. It is a good idea to watch these videos, or at least the HTML validation video, before trying to use the program. They are not very long, and watching them will reduce the amount of time it takes you to learn to use the program.
To validate a file that is on your hard drive, first open the file in the editor, then click the down arrow next to the Validate button on the task bar. You will see several options. Selecting Full will give you not only errors, but messages containing suggestions as well. Errors only will only show you actual errors, and Errors and warnings only will tell you if there are things that could be errors, but might not be. You can experiment with the different options to see which one you like best.
After you select a validation option, a box will appear at the bottom of the screen listing all of the errors, as well as warnings and messages depending on the option you chose. You might be surprised at how many errors there are, especially if you are using WordPress to create the code for your site. The code is often not as clean as you might expect it to be. However, not all of the errors you see, will be things that you need to worry about or correct.
Yes, it is better to have a website with perfect coding, but one of the advantages of using WordPress is that, you don’t have to know how to code to build a website. If you do not know anything about HTML coding, you may do more harm than good by trying to fix minor errors, such as omission of a slash at the end of a tag. Most of these errors will not cause problems anyhow. You should look through the errors and fix the ones you know how to fix. If you are completely mystified by what you see here, don’t worry about it too much unless you are having a problem with the way your website loads or displays. If the errors are causing problems, you’ll either have to learn a bit about coding or hire someone who knows what they’re doing to fix your website.
If you want to be able to check the code of an entire website at once, you’ll need to buy the Pro version of CSE HTML Validator. You can then use the batch wizard to check your website. This feature is not available in the Standard or Lite versions of the software. To use the batch wizard, click on Tools, then Batch Wizard. A new window will pop up, allowing you to choose the files you want to check. Click on the button with the large green plus sign, and select the appropriate option to add files or URLs to your list. You can add files individually, add an entire folder, or even add a URL.
To check an entire site, you can add the root file for your domain from your hard drive, or you can add the URL for the root domain.
Once you have added your target, click on it.
Now, click on Target in the main menu bar, then on Properties.
Click on the Follow Links tab in the box that pops up, then check the box in front of Follow and validate links.
Click on the OK button and then click on the Process button to start validating.
Checking your inbound link count with Bing Webmaster
Bing Webmaster allows you to get information about backlinks, crawl errors, and search traffic to your websites. In order to get the maximum value from this tool, you’ll need to authenticate each of your websites to prove that you own them. To get started, go to https://www.bing.com/webmaster/ and sign up with your Microsoft account. As a part of the sign up process, you’ll get a HTML file, that you’ll install in the root directory of your WordPress installation. This file validates that you are the owner of the website and entitled to see the data that Bing collects.
One core use for Bing Webmaster is that it presents a highly accurate picture of one’s inbound link counts. If you recall, Google does not present accurate inbound link counts to users. Thus, Bing Webmaster is the most authoritative picture from a search engine, that you’ll have of how many backlinks your site enjoys.
To see your inbound links, simply log in and navigate to the Dashboard. At the lower right, you’ll see the Inbound Links table shown here:
The table shows you the inbound links to your website for each page of content. This helpful feature lets you determine, which articles of content are garnering the most interest from the other webmasters. High link counts are always good, but you also want to make sure you are getting high quality links from websites in the same general category as your site.
Bing offers an additional feature: link keyword research. Expand the Diagnostics & Tools entry on the navigation bar on the left, and click Keyword Research.
The search traffic section will give you valuable information about the search terms you should be targeting for your site, as well as allowing you to see which of the terms you are already targeting are getting traffic. Just as you did with the keywords shown in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, you want to find keywords that are getting traffic, but are not currently ranked in the top one to three positions in the search engine results pages. Send more links to these pages with the keyword phrase you want to target as anchor text, in order to move these pages up in the rankings.
Monitoring ranking positions and movement with Rank Tracker
Rank Tracker is a paid tool and we’ve included it because it is tremendously valuable and noteworthy. Rank Tracker is a software tool that can monitor your website’s rankings for thousands of terms in hundreds of different search engines. Even more, it maintains a historical ranking data that helps you gauge your progress as you work. It is a valuable tool that is used by many SEO professionals. There is a free version, although the free version does not allow you to save your work (and thus does not let you save historical information). To really harness the power of this software, you’ll need the paid version. You can download either version from http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/. After you install the program, you will be prompted to enter the URL of your website. On the next screen, the program will ask you to input the keywords you wish to track. If you have them all listed in a spreadsheet somewhere, you can just copy the column that has your keywords in it and paste them all into the tool. Then Rank Tracker will ask you which search engines you are targeting and will check the rank of each keyword in all of the search engines you select. It only takes a few minutes for Rank Tracker to update hundreds of keywords, so you can find out where you are ranking in very little time.
This screenshot shows the main interface of the Rank Tracker software. For monitoring progress on large numbers of keywords on several different search engines, Rank Tracker can be a real time-saver:
Once your rankings have been updated, you can sort them by rank to see which ones will benefit the most from additional link building. Remember that more than half of the people who search for something in Google, click on the first result. If you are not in the top three to five results, you will get very little traffic from people searching for your targeted keyword. For this reason, you will usually get the best results by working on the keywords that are ranking between #4 and #10 in the search engine results pages.
If you want more data to play with, you can click on Update KEI, to find out the keyword effectiveness index for each keyword. This tool gathers the data from Google, to tell you how many searches per month and how much competition there is for each keyword, and then calculates the KEI score based on that data. As a general rule, the higher the KEI number is, the easier it will be to rank for a given keyword. Keep in mind, however, that if you are already ranking for the keyword, it will usually not be that difficult to move up in the rankings, even if the KEI is low. To make it easier to see which keywords will be easy to rank, they are color-coded in the Rank Tracker tool. The easiest ones are green, and the hardest are red. Yellow and orange fall in between.
In addition to checking your rankings on keywords you are targeting, you can use the Rank Tracker tool to find more keywords to target. If you navigate to Tools and then Get Keyword Suggestions, a window will pop up that will let you choose from a range of different methods of finding keywords. It is recommended that you start with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. After you choose the method, you’ll be asked to enter keywords that are relevant to the content of your website. You will only get about 100 results no matter how many keywords you enter, so it’s best to work on just one at a time. On the next page, you will be presented with a list of keywords. Select the ones you want to add and click on Next. When the tool is done updating the data for the selected keywords, click on the Finish button to add them to your project.
You can repeat this process as many times as you want to find new keywords for your website, and you can experiment with the other fifteen tools as well, which should give you more variety. When you find keywords that look promising, put them on a list, and plan on writing posts to target those keywords in the future. Look for keywords that have at least 100 searches per month, with a relatively low amount of competition.
Rank Tracker not only allows you to check your current rankings, but it also keeps track of your historical data as well. Every time you update, a new point will be added to the progress graph so you can see your progress over time. This allows you to see, whether what you are doing is working or not. If you see that your rank is dropping for a certain keyword, you can use that information to figure out whether something you changed had the opposite effect that you intended.
If you are doing SEO for clients, you’ll find the reports in Rank Tracker to be extremely useful (if not mandatory). You can create a monthly report for each client that shows how many keywords are ranked #1, as well as how many are in the top 10, 20, or 100. The report also shows the number of keywords that moved up and the number that moved down. You can use these reports to show your clients how much progress you are making and demonstrate your value to the client.
If you want to take advantage of the historical data, you’ll have to purchase the paid version of Rank Tracker. The free version does not support saving your projects, so you won’t have data from your past rankings to compare and see whether you are moving up or down in the search engine results. You also won’t be able to generate reports, that tell you what has changed from the last time you updated your rankings.
Monitoring backlinks with majestic SEO
If you want to see how many backlinks you have pointing to your site along with a range of additional data, the king of free backlink tools is the powerful Majestic SEO backlink checker tool. To use this tool, go to https://majestic.com/ and enter your domain in the box at the top of the page. The tool will generate a report that shows how many URLs are indexed for your domain, how many total backlinks you have, and how many unique domains link to your website. For heavy-duty link reconnaissance, you’ll want the paid upgrade. Underneath the site info, you can see the stats for each page on your site. The tool shows the number of backlinks for each page, as well as the number of domains linking to each page. You can only see ten results per page, so you’ll have to click through numerous pages to see all of the results if you have a large site.
Majestic SEO offers a few details that you won’t get from Google or Bing Webmaster. Majestic SEO calculates and reports the number of separate C class subnets upon which your backlinks appear. As we have learned, links from sites on separate C class subnets are more valuable, because they are perceived by search engines as being truly non-duplicate links. Majestic SEO also reports the number of .edu and .gov upon which your links appear. This extra information gives you a clear picture of how effective your link building efforts are progressing. Majestic offers another feature of note: Majestic crawls the web more deeply, so you’ll see higher link counts. Majestic is particularly useful when doing link cleanup, because it scrapes low-value sites that Google and Bing don’t bother indexing.
This screenshot highlights some of Majestic SEO’s more robust features: it shows you the number of backlinks from .edu and .gov domains as well as the number of separate Class C subnets upon which your inbound links appear:
Majestic SEO offers one more special feature; it records and graphs your backlink acquisition over time. The graph in the screenshot just above, shows this feature in action.
Majestic SEO is not a search engine, so it will show you a count of inbound links without any regards to the quality of the pages on which your links appear. Put another way, Bing Webmaster will only show you links that appear on indexed pages. Lower value pages, such as pages with duplicate content or pages in low-value link directories, tend not to appear in search engine indexes. As such, Majestic SEO reports higher link counts than Bing Webmaster or Google.
Summary
In this article, we learned how to monitor your progress through the use of free and paid tools. We learned how to set up and employ Google Analytics, to measure and monitor where your website visitors are coming from and how they behave on your site. We learned how to set up and use Google Webmaster Tools to detect crawling errors on your site and learned how Googlebot interacts with your site. We discovered two HTML validation tools that you can use to ensure that your website’s code meets current HTML standards.
Finally, we learned how to measure and monitor your backlink efforts with Bing Webmaster and Majestic SEO. With the tools and techniques in this article, you can ensure that your optimization efforts are effective and remain on track.
Resources for Article:
Further resources on this subject:
- Creating Blog Content in WordPress [Article]
- Responsive Web Design with WordPress [Article]
- Introduction to a WordPress application’s frontend [Article]
