Why do you have a website? You want to promote yourself, sell a thing-a-ma-gig or get a message out there in the big world of the internet. So how do you know if it is doing the job you had planned for it to do?

If you had a shop this can be easily done, you count how many people come in, you can ask them how they found you and you can note what they are looking at in your shop. So why not do this on your website? You can and it’s not that hard to setup and work with… and if you do it yourself it’s FREE!

Google offer a set of tools on your Google account for all the websites you own. the tools that you need to set up immediately Google Analytics, Google Search console, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Business. If you have not got these tools then set them up immediately.

After you have created your Google account and validated all of your websites with analytics, search console and webmasters tools you will gradually build up profile data of your visitors, where they come from and how they found you. Now that is useful, you can see if your website plan and goals are being hit. If not then you can adjust it and then measure your websites change.

So what info can you get?

Search Queries

The Search Queries section shows the keywords that led users to your site.

This list shows which keywords users searched for when they came to your site. This tool is essential as you will see if your search engine optimisation (SEO) is working the way you want it.

In the Search Queries section, you can also see the number of impressions and the number of clicks, which gives you an idea about the Click-through Rate CTR for this keyword. All equal, a higher CTR means the keyword is relevant, so you might want to invest some more efforts into this keyword.

Links

An equally useful section of Google Webmaster Tools is the Links to your site section. You need to get inbound links for your website as soon as possible, this is especially important at your websites launch.

Here you can see where your backlinks (internal and external) come from, as well as the pages they are linking to one of the advanced uses of the Links section is to disavow links to your site you deem harmful. Links from bad sites can hurt your rankings, so if you will need to remove them.

 Keywords

Similarly to the Search Queries section that also deals with keywords (but it is the ones users type to get to your site), the Keywords section also shows keywords. However, the difference is that here you see what keywords (and their significance) Google has found on your site. The two lists (of keywords users’ type and the keywords Google finds on your site) could be very different, which means you are not optimizing for what users are searching for.

The Keywords section also allows to see the subject and proposition of your site, which post Panda has become even more important.

There are other more advanced tools that we will not discuss here as this post is an introduction into getting data from your site. These include crawl errors, Sitemaps, Robot files and other stuff!

In conclusion you have to ask yourself or the person/company who is managing your website do we have Google tools set up for it. IF NOT…WHY NOT?

All of our packages come with Google Tools set up free as standard. Find the right package for you in our pricing page.