If there ever was one plugin to rule them all, it would be Site Kit by Google. This is Google’s official WordPress plugin, you have heard about Google before right?
Site Kit allows you to interact with all of Google’s Webmaster tools from within your WordPress dashboard without doing any coding whatsoever.
As a website owner you want to see how many people visit your website and how they found you and this is where Site Kit comes in, it gives you access to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Pagespeed Insights and it even gives you access to Google Adsense which allows you to earn money from each visitor you get and it does all of this for free.
Google Search Console: This is my favorite tool from Google, it allows me to see what people are searching for and how Google matches that search with my website. For instance, on this website Google ranks my website very high when people search for “SEO services” but Google ranks my website lower when people search for “WordPress Web Development”. This tells me two things, it tells me there is an opportunity to rank better for WordPress related content because there is search volume for it and it tells me that right now my content is not good enough to get the first-page ranking for it as I get for content about SEO services. This tool enabled me to apply my mind and write more WordPress related content and as a result, attract a new kind of audience to ErikThiart.com
To be clear, Google Search Console does not even begin to hold a candle to the raw data that Google Analytics is able to provide.
That’s because unlike Google Analytics, the Search Console platform isn’t designed to give you insight into your site’s visitors and their behavior. Instead, it’s intended to serve as a tool for monitoring your presence in search results and to be used in conjunction with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics: This is the single most important Google Service to have on your website. This tool allows you to see who visited your website and how they found you on the internet, for instance, did they Google your business name or did they Google a service you offered or a topic you covered on your website or did the user click on a Tweet or a post on Facebook.
These are some of the questions you might have that Google Analytics can answer for you.
There are many other additional questions that Google Analytics can answer for you, but these are the ones that I think are the most important questions for most website owners.
For instance, on my website one of the most popular pieces of content I have is this article on how to use the Tor browser, I would never have guessed that to be the case, but with Google Analytics installed on my website I am now able to better understand where to invest my time.
Google Pagespeed Insights: This tool enables you to make sure your website is optimized sufficiently. Google will give you various suggestions through it’s Pagespeed Insights tool on what you can do to improve the performance of your website. A score of 90 or above is considered good. 50 to 90 is a score that needs improvement, and below 50 is considered poor.
A very simple way to increase your score is to make sure you use images that are small in filesize. A very common issue I get with clients is that they take a picture with their phone and then upload that image “as is” to their website effectively displaying a 5000 x 4000 pixel 5MB image on a website in a container of 300 x 200 pixels. If they instead resized that image before uploading it to the website they could reduce the file size by more than 95% and as a result have a much faster website.
This is where PSI really comes in handy as it will quickly show you which images are taking too long to load and that is generally a very good indicator that the image can be optimized better.
Google Adsense: Did you ever browse a website and saw the ads on the side or in between the content and wondered how that website can get people to advertise on their website, well that is where Google Adsense comes in, at its core Adsense acts as a broker between advertiser who wants to get users to buy their products. Google does this by placing the advertiser’s ad on a website that it feels attracts visitors that might be interested in that advertiser’s product.
Imagine you have a blog and you write about financial products and investing, imagine your focus of the website is to teach people how to work with money. If you want to make money from this content then you would place Google Adsense on your articles, this way Google will then get advertisers such as banks and investment companies to advertise on your website because your audience matches their target group and when one of your users click on that ad the advertiser pays Google a fee and Google then immediately splits that fee with you. You earn money every time one of your visitors clicks on one of the ads placed on your website by Google.
Through the Site Kit plugin, this complexity is simplified and made available to you from the get-go, all you need to do is write quality content on a topic you are interested in.
The first step is to install it in your WordPress admin panel.
After you installed Site Kit, you can activate other Google tools:
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