It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written an SEO for Sex Bloggers post. SEO is my full-time day job, and it just got to the point where it was feeling too much like work to write about SEO here and at the office. So I won’t be doing these posts weekly anymore, but there are still some topics I want to cover, one of which is the difference between Google Search Console and WordPress Insights!
WordPress seems to be the most popular blogging platform among the bloggers I know, but if you’re using a different platform and have specific questions, please let me know!
Let’s start with the good things that WordPress will tell you in your dashboard:
- Referrers: These are the sites where people found a link to your website, and clicked on it to visit your site.
- Top pages/posts: Regardless of how they got there, this number takes into account all the views on a specific page or post, though you can also modify this to look at visitors instead of page views.
- Visitors: Page views are nice because the numbers are higher, but visitors is where you should be looking. These are the individual people who have visited your site.
- Clicks: The opposite of Referrers, these are the links you have to your site that point to other websites that visitors have clicked on and subsequently left your website.
Now, WP will show you good things! These are good to know! However, it only provides you with an incomplete picture of how people are getting to your site. Unless you have a significant amount of traffic, you’re more likely to see “Unknown Search Terms” under that handy Search Engine Terms title.
That’s where Google Search Console comes in.
Search Console will tell you things about your organic performance like:
- Top pages: For any given time period, these are the pages that see the most traffic from organic search.
- Top queries: These are the terms that people are using in search engines to find your website. This is specific to Google, though you can set up Bing Webmaster Tools if you feel like it, but I never do. #LazyBlogger
- Click through rate: This one can be kind of underrated! If you’re seeing a page get a few of the same query, but have a really high CTR, that means that people using that search term are finding exactly what they want with your result! That’s great! Conversely, if you see a term and its variants showing up frequently in your reports, but you’re seeing a very low CTR, people aren’t getting what they’re looking for with your result, and you should look into why that page is being served for that search query.
- Position: Position refers to the position in the organic search results. If you’re in position 1, that means you’re at the very top of the page! These will likely be decimals since they’re averages, but it’s good to see this information trend over time to see if a page suddenly dropped out of the rankings and needs to be further investigated.
Ultimately, WP and GSC both give you good things, but you’ll want to use both (and Google Analytics!) in order to get a more complete, holistic view of how your website is performing in organic search.
As always, I’m here for questions! You can get my attention through my contact form, or on Twitter, where I’m more likely to respond more immediately.
Happy reporting!