Analyze search performance and user behavior
Analyze search performance and user behavior
Analyzing your search performance
Major search engines, including Google, provide tools for website owners to analyze their performance in their search engine. For Google, that tool is Search Console.
Search Console provides two important categories of information: Can Google find my content? How am I performing in Google Search results?
Using Search Console won’t help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results.
With the service, website owners can:
- See which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
- Test and submit sitemaps
- Analyze or generate robots.txt files
- Remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
- Specify your preferred domain
- Identify issues with
titleanddescriptionmeta tags - Understand the top searches used to reach a site
- Get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
- Receive notifications of quality guidelines violations and request a site reconsideration
Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools also offers tools for website owners.
Analyzing user behavior on your site
If you’ve improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you’re probably curious about the traffic coming to your site. Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:
- Get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
- Discover the most popular content on your site
- Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site, for example, did changing those
titleanddescriptionmeta tags improve traffic from search engines?
For advanced users, the information an analytics package provides, combined with data from your server log files, can provide even more comprehensive information about how visitors are interacting with your documents (such as additional keywords that searchers might use to find your site).