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Using Search Analytics to improve your website

Webmasters can leverage the Search Analytics Report in Google Search Console to improve their website visibility in search engine results pages (SERP). To give some background, the first step of the search engine pipeline is
  1. crawling, then
  2. indexing, followed by the last step which is
search results, which includes a) ranking and b) display of results to users.
Search Analytics Report data sheds light on "search results" in the search engine pipeline. Use Search Analytics Report from Google Search Console to improve your site. You have 2 tools at your disposal
  1. Search Console
  2. Google Analytics
to improve your site
  1. When a user clicks on the query in the SERP and comes to your site, that is where traditional Google Analytics comes in. You can use metrics such as "Bounce Rate" to determine why visitors are leaving your site.
  2. Search Analytics Report in Search Console also displays "impressions data", that is when searchers see your site, but might not click through.

  1. Crawling: Google discovers your page exists
  2. Indexing: Google learns what your page is about, your page title
  3. Serving: Google responds to a person searching Google.com and delivers (“serves”) your website as a result, within a certain ranking.

GA Landing Pages

In Google Analytics, click on the following links in this sequence.
  1. Acquisition,
  2. Search Console,
  3. Queries
Instead of Queries you can also click on Landing Pages:
Often we see people that want to bring more visitors to their site over focus their attention on
  1. 1) Search Analytics and 2) ranking, when there are even bigger gains in search friendliness, if they investigated
    1. how their website is crawled or
    2. if they reduced duplicates,
    so that their site is more optimally indexed.There are technical things you can do to your site to increase the number of visitors coming to your site. Remove duplicate elements such (duplicate title tags) so that your site is more optimally indexed.
    Investigate the technical indexing before conducting the SEO Analysis of impressions. Before you focus on how "Search Analytics" in Google bring people to your site, focus on how your site is crawled.
  2. The ranking of pages in the SERP is only 1 part of the process. Ranking is 1 of 5 elements that will contribute to conversion. The ultimate goal is to have users convert on your site.

  1. Crawling
  2. Indexing
  3. Ranking and search appearance
  4. Page content,
  5. Conversion

Steps 4 and 5 occur after the user has clicked on the SERP and arrives at your website.

Examples of Conversions:

Examples of conversions are:
  1. Buying a product
  2. Becoming a subscriber

For a publisher, your objective is to increase the time on site. If you are selling ad space on your website you want to increase the number of page views and decrease the bounce rate.