Google is continually updating the way it ranks your web site organically and in Google Adwords.  Keeping track of all the changes will make you dizzy and exasperated! The best policy for long term success has always been to concentrate on delivering fresh, relevant and well organised content to your web site and engagement of your audience through social media.

The most important way of measuring the success of any web site is through the emails, phone calls and eCommerce conversions you achieve.  However, if you wish to track your web site’s performance and micro manage to improve your rankings to give you chance of hearing from new customers, Google has a range of tools to help you.

If you are a client of ours, we will have set you up with a free Google Account and installed Google Analytics on your web site as part of the original project.  Google Analytics is an ever changing tool that gives you every type of analysis and drill down to the number of visitors on your site, how long they stay, where they came from and what they purchased (if you take orders on-line).  However, a while ago, Google started encrypting their search results and the keywords users typed in to find your web site stopped being shown in Analytics.  Fortunately, they have partially remedied this huge hole with a new tool in Google Webmasters – which incidentally they’ve also re-named as the search console at the same time.

Google Webmaster tools gives you a lot of help with your web site and areas for improving code, how many pages are indexed but the area that has recently been completely transformed is the Search Analytics tool as per the above image.  Search Analytics as can be seen above provides a high quality information with a variety of filters.  What I have deleted from the graphic are the queries that are used to find your site which you can also drill down (graphic below) into and monitor your position in the organic rankings for the last 90 days (perhaps the only drawback is the limited amount of time you can go back and compare).  From the graphic you will also note the number of updates that Google has done to its algorithm that it has felt worthy to mention.

Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Drill Down – check your position, impressions and more over 90 days

Another useful tool, in another Google application is the keywords tool in Google Adwords. This allows you to put in a keyword, or page on your web site and it will provide similar keywords searched by users and how many times they are searched each month.  When you have been in your industry and business for a while using industry terms, it is sometimes surprising to see what your potential customers type in!  A classic example is an electrician would call a light bulb a lamp.