Goals:
Please click the [ Mark Complete ] button at the bottom of this page when you’re able to achieve the following goals:
- Review and gain an appreciation for the potential of Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), including the July 2021 update to Search Console Insights.
- Explain how you can check which keywords have brought users to a page, including how many clicks are associated with those keywords, and why this can help your Search Engine optimisation.
- Review Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
- Learn how and why to manually index products on the Barcodes Database.
Google Search Console and Search Console Insights
In July 2021 Google rolled out an exciting new feature called Search Console Insights.
To access the Google Search Console:
- Make sure you are logged into the Google account we have linked with your Search Console property.
- Go to https://search.google.com/search-console
- Log in and look at your website on the Search Console page.
> You will notice a yellow bar running along the top “SEARCH CONSOLE INSIGHTS”.
- When you visit the SEARCH CONSOLE INSIGHTS for the first time, you will be given some basic information about the search terms that brought users to your site.
You will be prompted to link up with your Google Analytics to get more detailed data. - Try to do this linking yourself, but if you can’t then email [email protected] or message James on Slack and he’ll link the accounts for you.
- Data that you can view:
- Once your Analytics is linked to your Search Console Insights, much more detailed data will be available.
You will be presented with a more detailed report on your site. There is a tonne of useful information like all time visits, how new content is performing, and which pages are most popular.
The best new feature, however, is that we can now see keywords that have brought users to a page.
Previously, Google kept this data hidden which made it frustratingly difficult to see exactly which search terms were bringing customers to particular pages.
Below is the search terms that lead customers to our QR code product page in Australia.
Note that you can identify which keywords and how many times those keywords were used:
NOTE: This feature is still in beta, so for now, the date range has been locked to only the last 28 days.
Useful application – find good keywords:
One of the more useful aspects of this tool is going to be finding good keywords to input for SE Ranking.
Now that we know which terms bring customers to our homepage (or even buy barcodes pages), it will be much easier to optimise for those terms and track our optimisation efforts via SE Ranking.
Also Watch: 
87 – (part) Google Search Console / Google Webmaster Tools : Use the left pane for feature-navigation | Select Search Traffic > Links to Your Site to see a breakdown of who links most often to your site and which content they most often link to | Select Google Index > Index Status to see how well your site has been indexed by Google, and whether there are any indexing errors | Select Crawl > Crawl Errors to see where Google has failed to properly crawl your site | Select Crawl > Sitemaps to see the status of sitemap/s and what issues/warnings the Google algorithm has encountered | Select Crawl > Fetch as Google to see how well Google fetches your site pages or your whole site |
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
Watch: 87 – Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
( You have access to your website Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools through your Google Account )
This video is a brief walkthrough of these tools, but if you are interested you can find plenty of online information, downloadable resources and even online courses on the Google tools | Log in to Google via https://myaccount.google.com | Once logged in, type into the header bar “analytics.google.com” and press Enter | While logged in, also open a new browser tab and type “google.com/webmasters/tools” and press Enter |
Your view in both of these Google tools depends on your Login, but this video look at some relevant features…
Google Analytics: Select Acquisition > Channels and select a date range at top right to view by default a website Users Summary graphic | Scroll down to look at the Channels through which your users have accessed your site, including Organic Search, Direct, Referral and Social | Change your Time Period to zoom in or out of your Users graphic | Click Organic Search to see a breakdown, including Transactions | In the left pane, click Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview… in this graphic you can click a dropdown at top left to switch from Ecommerce to something else such as Transactions | Mouseover the graph at any point to see text details | Refer also to Google Help for detailed instructions |
Google Search Console / Google Webmaster Tools : Use the left pane for feature-navigation | Select Search Traffic > Links to Your Site to see a breakdown of who links most often to your site and which content they most often link to | Select Google Index > Index Status to see how well your site has been indexed by Google, and whether there are any indexing errors | Select Crawl > Crawl Errors to see where Google has failed to properly crawl your site | Select Crawl > Sitemaps to see the status of sitemap/s and what issues/warnings the Google algorithm has encountered | Select Crawl > Fetch as Google to see how well Google fetches your site pages or your whole site |
Google Webmaster and how to index products on Barcodes Database
Watch: 88b – Google Webmaster – indexing products on Barcodes Database (Updated video)
Google indexing makes content immediately available to Google Search, so indexing your pages can help with your visibility online.
New appearance of Google Search Console | How our barcode numbers are indexed so that they can be located | Example of searching for a barcode number | How to view Webmaster information on a crawled/indexed page | Request test indexing of a Live URL, which adds that URL to a priority crawl queue, then you can view the (very fast) result of that indexing in a Google Search result | Request Indexing and view the same Live URL result in different languages |