Day 30: Review your Google Analytics and Search Console
Now that you have set up your account on Google analytics and search console, it is important to keep a track of it. Both are free Google tools that help you to keep a better track of your website. Let us now have a look at the most important things should keep reviewing regularly on both tools.
Important reports of Google analytics you must regularly review-
1. Audience overview:
When you log in your analytics account, it is the default report that is shown to you. It shows the number of sessions and visitors on your website for the last 30 days. In addition to this, it also has a metrics that shows the average time users spend on your site, pages visited by them on an average and the bounce rate of your site.
2. Source / Medium:
This report shows the main source from where your site traffic is coming. This includes organic search, referrals, and social media. You can also see the direct traffic to your site, that means when the user typed your website address in the search bar.
3. Social Network Referrals:
This report shows the top social network mediums that send traffic to your site. In this report, the details of all social networks are combined so that you can look at the traffic to your site from these mediums as a whole.
4. All Pages:
This report tells you that which are the pages on your site that receive the most traffic. It is most beneficial for content marketers as it tells that which page is doing the best, how much time is the user sending on each page and how many people exit your website after viewing this page.
5. Reverse Goal Path:
This report tells you the path through which a user reaches your goal url. This path looks up to the last 3 pages the user visit to reach your goal url. For example, you have a page x on your site. The user can either go there by going through A > C > X, or by A > M > O > X. Now, this report will show you the goal completion URL and the URL of the last 3 pages that the user visit reach the final url.
Important features of Google Search Console you must regularly review-
1. Your sitemap:
Once you have submitted your sitemap to Google, keep checking it regularly for any errors or whether it still contains the correct URLs or not. If you have upgraded your site from HTTP from HTTPs, make sure you have the updated urls in your sitemap.
2. Crawl Errors:
This section tells which are the broken pages on your website along with the day when they were detected. You should review this list every month so that you can assign the most relevant pages to the broken links and redirect them. When you fix your crawl errors, mark them as fixed in your list.
3. Indexing Status:
This shows what pages of your website is Google indexing. See this regularly to check any site error that is preventing the web page from getting indexed. A fluctuation of 10-20 pages is normal every month so do not panic in such a case.
4. Links to your site:
This section tells which sites are linking to your site and how many times. Reviewing this regularly can protect your site from spam sites. In case of any weird or strange url, consult an SEO service provider.
5. HTML Improvements:
You can get suggestions on how to improve HTML to enhance your site. This involves notifying duplicate content, long and short meta descriptions and title tags. You can fix the errors on the pages notified in this section.
