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There’s an adage that says, “If you can measure it, you can improve it.” In digital marketing, the “it” you’ll want to measure is often search engine optimization. While SEO usually takes time to yield results, it doesn’t mean those results shouldn’t be measured from the start of an SEO campaign.

Knowing you should track the results of your SEO is one thing. Actually doing it is another. Luckily, Google has some free tools you can use to track the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns with ease.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a widely used tool that enables you to interpret how visitors are using your website. You can use the data provided by this platform to figure out how you can increase the traffic that visits your site and identify the ways you can improve your website’s digital presence.

In other words, Google Analytics gives you an accurate picture of your site’s traffic. It shows you how people interact with your site. Here are just a handful of the statistics you can track using Google Analytics:

Total site visits
Average time on site
Bounce rate
New visitors vs returning visitors
Most visited times of day
Mobile vs tablet vs desktop users
Pages per session

In addition to key performance indicators like the ones just mentioned, Google Analytics can provide some demographic information about the people who visit your website. The platform has the added benefit of being able to integrate with Adsense, Google Plus and AdWords seamlessly.

Google Search Console

While Google Analytics is helpful, it doesn’t necessarily give you all the information you’ll need to make your SEO strategy more effective. That’s where Google Search Console comes into play.

Formerly known as Google Webmaster, Google Search Console is a tool that makes the relationship between where your site lands in search engine results pages and SEO much clearer. This means the information you get from this platform is often more immediately actionable because it’s less objective than the data you’ll get from Google Analytics.

Google Search Console emphasizes impressions, and it monitors how your site appears to people who are conducting searches using specific keywords and phrases. Here are some of the KPIs you can track with Google Search Console:

Click-through rates
Search queries
Crawler mistakes
HTML errors
Links from external sources

Which Platform Is Better?

By now, you may be wondering which platform is better. The truth is, neither one is better than the other because Google Analytics and Google Search Console serve different purposes. Google Analytics is focused on user behavior and clicks whereas Google Search Console is search engine-oriented and it prioritizes impressions. The key takeaway is that both platforms are useful to anyone who wants to measure the success of their SEO campaigns.

Partner with NW Media Collective, Inc.

NW Media Collective, Inc. is an SEO agency that can use all the tools available to improve the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console. We offer custom SEO packages for businesses across industries, and we provide actionable reports about your search engine optimization that can improve your site’s digital presence.

To learn more about the ways our SEO company can help your SEO campaigns, contact NW Media Collective, Inc. now.