How many times have you been inside WordPress and had to go into another window to take a closer look at your Google analytics or search console data to create a plan of action for your website? Do you find yourself easily frustrated by the fact that you can’t just access the data you need all in one place? If you said yes, then Google has answered your prayers with the Google Site Kit plugin they released at the end of October.
Installing this plugin gives you access to data and reports from Google directly in your WordPress dashboard. Though six Google products are included at this time, you aren’t required to install all of them. This allows you to customize your experience further and streamline your reporting.
It’s especially helpful to you as SEOs who want to be able to show their clients essential data about their website visitors and traffic but who have clients that don’t want to delve into the data themselves on Google.
What’s Included in the Google Site Kit Plugin?
When you install the plugin, you’ll have the option of activating any or all of the following Google products.
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console helps you see how many people saw and clicked on your website in Google search, what queries showed your site in search, and your average search position. You’ll also be able to see Impressions, click-through rate, and position for your site as well as the various query strings that users were searching for. Search Console is automatically enabled for all sites using site kit.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to see how people navigate your website once they arrived on it. You can see what pages are popular, how many people saw each page, the length of time they’re spending on each page, as well as the page they are on when they leave your site.
PageSpeed Insights
The PageSpeed Insights module is most useful for developers. It helps you understand the real-world performance of your site as experienced by Chrome users. It makes it easy to get recommendations for optimizing your site speed.
Optimize
The Optimize module is most useful for marketers and small businesses that want to test variations of your pages. With Site Kit, you can set up optimize without any coding required.
Tag Manager
If you’re using Tag Manager to manage your marketing campaigns, you can use the site kit to set up the tag manager without any code editing required. Then, you can easily manage your tags in the tag manager.
AdSense
Google AdSense is useful for websites that are using the platform to monetize their content. Enabling this module allows you to track ad performance across your site.
How to Install and Set up Google Site Kit
To get started, all you have to do is log into your WordPress website and click “Plugins” in the left navigation menu. Click add new. Enter “Site Kit” in the search bar, and you should see the site kit plugin display on the search results page. Click to install and then activate the Google site kit plugin, just like you would any other WordPress plugin. After activation, you’ll be prompted to complete the setup.
Click the “Start Setup” button.
You’ll be prompted to give access to your website’s Google Search Console profile. This means you’ll need to sign in to the Gmail account that has access to your site’s search console profile.
After you logged in, you must give permission for Google to access the data in the Search Console profile.
After you’ve granted all the necessary permissions, you will get a completion notification, and then you will be able to click on “Go to my Dashboard.”
Once you arrive in the dashboard, you’ll be presented with options to connect to other Google services, including AdSense, Analytics, and PageSpeed insights. You can choose to link to those services if you want to.
To connect to the Tag Manager and Optimize, you’ll need to visit the settings of the plugin.
The Google site kit plugin allows you to dive into your reporting with navigation options on the left to drill down. You can also enable the admin bar feature to see individual page stats.
Will Installing Google Site Kit Negatively Affect Page Speed?
Google Site Kit is a plugin that is developed and maintained by Google, so you know it is coded with speed and SEO in mind. Ultimately, it should have little to no effect on your overall page speed. However, if your website is bogged down with numerous WordPress plugins, you may see a slight change.
Google Site Kit is still young, so we expect to see several features added in future updates of the plugin. In the meantime, it’s a good idea to review your main dashboard every week and look for significant changes in how people are finding your site. Keep track of how your recent posts are doing by checking the individual page reports.
Take time to compare the top-performing pages and look at how people found them. Is a particular topic or product attracting more visitors from social channels? If so, you can add more about that topic or similar products to see if the trend continues. If you haven’t already, enable Pagespeed Insights and analytics to see whether or not page load time affects your bounce rate.
Have you, or are you going to, install this on your WordPress site? Have you been impressed with the results so far? Share your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
