Google is everywhere when it comes to modern marketing and general web use. The amount of information that Google offers to SEO experts along with its suite of tools and resources is unparalleled. Two such tools that Google provides to marketing and SEO experts are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. While both of these tools are helpful in improving your website’s performance and visibility, there are a lot of differences - from the way they track data to what data points they track and more. In this blog, these differences are exactly what we will talk about.
Google Analytics provides data about your website’s performance. The SEO expert uses Google Analytics to learn about who is visiting the website, how they are getting to it, statistics like visit time and the nature of their visit too.
Google Search Console on the other hand, is used for optimizing and improving your website. Google Search Console data is not focused on statistics regarding your site’s visitors - it is more about how your website appeals to Google, and those searching for related phrases on the platform. GSC deals more with things like HTML errors, links from other websites and internal linking between your webpages.
Let's talk more about some of the metrics tracked by Google Analytics and Google Search Console to better understand this difference.
Google Analytics tracks over 10,000 metrics, but not all of them are equally important. We'll stick to the most important ones here to give you an idea of what you can use Google Analytics for.
Demographics of your Audience
Audience Demographics help you understand the type of people visiting your website. Are more young professionals visiting your website, or is it popular among businessmen in their 50s? These gender and age demographics can help the SEO expert to update your website and reach out to your target audience.
Acquisition
This part of Google Analytics helps the SEO expert attract visitors and increase website traffic. Visitor data is split into various categories like Direct (users who typed the domain name directly into their browsers), Referral (users who found the website from another website or blog), Organic Search (users who clicked on your website from some search results) and so on.
Time Spent
This metric helps the SEO expert to learn about the time each visitor is spending on a website. It helps to know if visitors are reading and enjoying the content on a website.
Pageviews
Unique pageviews measure the individual people who viewed a particular page at least once in their visit. This is used by an SEO expert to understand what the visitors are looking for and how the website can be optimized.
There are a lot of other metrics in Google Analytics, but we talked about just a few of them to give you an idea of what type of data it collects and how the SEO expert can use it. Let's now move on to Google Search Console and see what it does differently.
Google Search Console is where the SEO expert would get information about a website's SEO (Search Engine Optimization) . This can be used as a tool to improve organic traffic, that is, visitors from any unpaid search result, and SEO efforts.
Search Analytics
The Search Report in Google Search Console provides details about a website’s performance in Google Search. This includes sections like Queries (keywords searched for in Google Search), Impressions (number of times users saw a link to the website in search results), Clicks (clicks on a Google search that landed on the website), CTR (Click Through Rate, the number of clicks divided by impressions), etc.
External Links to Your Website
The external links to a website play a major role in its SEO and where it ranks. This is one of the most important datasets for an SEO expert. It is used to understand which websites are linking to your website, what content is linked most frequently, and the anchor text used to link to your website.
Internal Links
The links within your own website are important as that is how Google would crawl through your website. This section can be used to learn which pages are performing well and which pages are performing poorly. Any pages with poor performance could mean that the links are confusing Google, and indicate an area for improvement.
Mobile Usability
Mobile compatibility is a must for any website. Google will demote your website if it is not mobile-friendly. This section shows you any usability issues on your website for mobile devices.
To sum it up, Google Search Console is where an SEO expert understands the website's search engine ranking and performance, as well as its link structure.
For an SEO expert, both these tools are invaluable and can help them accomplish a lot. Together, Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help an SEO expert get a picture of what efforts are working, what needs improvement, and how the SEO expert can help your website reach its targets.