Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console to find out what’s bringing people to your website

Most established online businesses harness the use of Google Analytics and Google Search Console to find out what’s bringing people to their site.

However, if you’re an established business recently moving online due to COVID-19 or you’re a new business, then you might feel a little intimidated. There’s so much to see and do, it’s almost overwhelming.

Luckily, there are only a few things you need to do to get started and start seeing results. Then later, if you want, you can go back and start digging deeper into the power of everything that’s possible.

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What is Google Search Console?

If COVID-19 has forced you to really focus on your website for the first time, then you probably don’t know what it takes to improve your site’s performance in Google’s search results. That’s OK. Google Search Console (GSC) is here to help.

In short, Google Search Console helps you improve and optimize your website by looking at how your site is performing in search results. It offers these features to help:

Reports which search queries bring people to your site
Detailed data from Google’s crawls of your site
Alerts when GSC finds a problem
Mobile usability stats
‘Rich Results’ monitoring and reports

What is Google Analytics?

Now that you’ve used Google Search Console to optimize your site, Google Analytics (GA) gives you loads of information about the actual traffic coming to your website.

So why does this matter? Well getting people to your website is one thing, and getting them to stick around for more than a few seconds is another concern entirely.

This is why GA is designed to help you see traffic data, such as the number of visitors to the site, which pages they are visiting, and how they interact with your site.

Google Analytics comes equipped with some other handy tools:

Customizable reports to personalize the data
Mobile app
Syncs with Google’s Marketing tools (Ads, Adsense)
Links with Search Console

And of course, Google has plenty of their own documentation when you’re ready to get started.

Google Site Kit WordPress plugin

If your website was built with WordPress then you may want to also consider the Google Site Kit plugin. It connects with both Google Analytics and Google Search Console and displays the data directly inside your WordPress dashboard.

The Google Site Kit team even went the extra mile to research and provide documentation on the stats that were found to be most useful for the average, non-technical small business owner.

We did it

You now have the ability to see where your traffic is coming from, information about your users, and insights into how they’re finding your site. Check your statistics about once a week or so and start looking for trends. And remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint!

You can do this!

If you need a helping hand, we’re here for you.

Check out our How-To videos for content aimed at helping you navigate through COVID-19.
Looking for stories and inspiration? Visit the GoDaddy YouTube channel.
Dig into resources on the GoDaddy blog.
Connect with like-minded people in our #OpenWeStand community forum.
Find answers to product questions in our Help Center.
Call or chat with one of our GoDaddy Guides.

Above all, have faith in yourself. We have faith in you.