During a Google Search Central Lightning Talks series video, Mariya Moeva, a product manager at Google, discusses how to make sure that your WordPress site is working for you.
She explains that the first thing you need to do to have a successful site is to translate your real life business goals into online metrics. You know why your business exists. Maybe you have a shop where you want to sell Swiss cheese. Or maybe you’re writing a blog where you talk about traveling to parts of the world. But how can you know if you’re doing well in the online world?
She then went on to explain if you have a blog, one thing that might be worth keeping track of is what portion of your readers are visiting only once and what portion come back, as well as how much time on average each of these groups is spending on the site and how many pages they’re looking at. And if you have a shop, she recommends that you might want to keep track of cart completions on the online version, instead of sales in the real world.
So once you determine what type of site related metrics you should track exactly, you need to define what tools provide them in a reliable way. You need to check things like how comprehensive the data is, what the sources are. And does it answer all of your questions because it might turn out that you need to mix information from a few different tools to get the full picture of how your site is doing. And of course, usability and price factor in here as well.
Is There a Steep Learning Curve?
Can you make this work with your site? Mariya explains that if it requires a significant learning curve to just start using it, then maybe something else would be a better option. Or maybe it provides really interesting data, but it’s charging you every month, whereas you could find the same data somewhere else for free.
Keeping Track of Your Users
Once you pick the right tools for your purposes and set everything up, the data will start aggregating. The most important thing here is to set a baseline so you can compare and track improvements later on. How is your site doing right now? How many cart completions are you getting per day? Or, if you have a blog, what’s the breakdown of new versus returning readers? You probably need to track this for a few months to get a solid set of data and really draw any conclusions. Be patient, Mariya says.
If you don’t know your site’s baseline, you wouldn’t know if you’re improving or not. And of course, when you set a goal, the other thing is to be realistic. We very often hear things like Oh, I want to show up for a word such and such at position number one in search results from site owners. She then goes into competition and why this is something to pay attention to: depending on how competitive your industry is, this might not be something worth chasing after. Even if you’re showing up for a specific word in a specific place, people actually don’t visit your site from the search results.
Digital Marketing is an Ongoing Process, Not a One-Time Setup
Finally, it’s important to remember that this is an ongoing process. It’s not a one time setup. Think about what actions you can take to improve specific metrics that are important to the success of your site, and then commit to following up when you see the metric change in either direction. Also set a schedule to check in on your site regularly. Soon, you’ll notice seasonality or weekly patterns, and you’ll get a feel for what to expect.
Now that we’ve seen the four principles in action, let’s look at how this would work in practice.
For her first example, Mariya uses Rosemary Rocket, who is a blogger writing about her travels on the WordPress site. Rosemary makes money in two ways. The first is from recommending places to stay and things to do in all the countries and cities she has already visited. She places links which give her a small commission when people book via her site. So one good online metric that she needs to track to understand how well her website is working for her is the click through rate, or CTR, on these links in her blog posts about different destinations.
Rosemary also offers a service to help build out an entire trip for people to a specific destination. Online, people can sign up on her site to get a custom itinerary from her. So a good metric would be to track completions of the signup form here as well. And now that she has defined two concrete, detailed metrics to keep track of, it’s time to track down which tools might have that information.
Tracking Your CTR (Click Through Rates)
In the case of click through rate or CTR for booking links, some good options might be to set up goals in Google Analytics to track the clicks and then compare these two page views for each post containing a link. Additionally, it would be a good idea to understand which posts are most popular in search, which is available in Search Console, and how people find these posts, which is also in Search Console where you can see all the queries that your site is showing up for in the search results.
For the other metric “how many people completed the form,” it’s possible to set up a tracking goal in Analytics as well. And it would also help to track bounce rate from analytics and understand how people find the page from search results via the search query information and Search Console.
Watch the “Growing Your WordPress Site” Video
Growing Your WordPress Site With Google Site Kit Transcript
Mariya Moeva 0:00
Hello, and welcome back to the Google Search Central lightning talks series. This time we’ll talk about WordPress sites and how to make sure your website is working for you. My name is Maria, and I’m a product manager in the search ecosystem team at Google. I will show you four steps you need to take to make sure your site is all set up to help your business. And then we’ll look at some real examples of how to apply these steps.
The first thing you need to do to have a successful site is to translate your real life business goals into online metrics. You know why your business exists. Maybe you have a shop where you want to sell Swiss cheese. Or maybe you’re writing a blog where you talk about traveling to parts of the world. But how can you know if you’re doing well in the online world? So for example, if you have a blog, one thing it might be worth to keep track of is what portion of your readers are visiting only once and what portion come back, as well as how much time on average each of these groups is spending on the site and how many pages they’re looking at.
And if you have a shop, you might want to keep track of cart completions on the online version, instead of sales in the real world. So once you determine what type of site related metrics you should track exactly, you need to define what tools provide them in a reliable way. You need to check things like how comprehensive the data is, what the sources are.
And does it answer all of your questions, because it might turn out that you need to mix information from a few different tools to get the full picture of how your site is doing. And of course, usability and price factor in here as well. Can you make this work with your site? If it requires a significant learning curve to just start using it, then maybe something else would be a better option. Or maybe it provides really interesting data, but it’s charging you every month, whereas you could find the same data somewhere else for free. Once you pick the right tools for your purposes and set everything up, the data will start aggregating. The most important thing here is to set a baseline so you can compare and track improvements later on.
How is your site doing right now? How many cart completions are you getting per day? Or, if you have a blog, what’s the breakdown of new versus returning readers? You probably need to track this for a few months to get a solid set of data and really draw any conclusions. Be patient. If you don’t know your site’s baseline, you won’t know if you’re improving or not. And of course, when you set a goal, the other thing is to be realistic.
We very often hear things like Oh, I want to show up for a word such and such at position number one in search results, from site owners. But depending on how competitive your industry is, this might not be something worth chasing after. Even if you’re showing up for a specific word in a specific place, people actually don’t visit your site from the search results. Finally, it’s important to remember that this is an ongoing process. It’s not a one time setup.
Think about what actions you can take to improve specific metrics that are important to the success of your site, and then commit to following up when you see the metric change in either direction. Also set a schedule to check in on your site regularly. Soon, you’ll notice seasonality or weekly patterns, and you’ll get a feel for what to expect. Now that we’ve seen the four principles in action, let’s look at how this would work in practice.
Taking the example of Rosemary Rocket, who is a blogger writing about her travels on the WordPress site. Rosemary makes money in two ways. The first is from recommending places to stay and things to do in all the countries and cities she has already visited. She places links, which give her a small commission when people book via her site. So one good online metric that she needs to track to understand how well her website is working for her is the click through rate, or CTR, on these links in her blog posts about different destinations.
Rosemary also offers a service to help build out an entire trip for people to a specific destination. Online, people can sign up on her site to get a custom itinerary from her. So a good metric would be to track completions of the signup form here as well. And now that she has defined two concrete, detailed metrics to keep track of, it’s time to track down which tools might have that information. In the case of click through rate or CTR for booking links, some good options might be to set up goals in Google Analytics to track the clicks and then compare these two page views for each post containing a link.
Additionally, it would be a good idea to understand which posts are most popular in search, which is available in Search Console, and how people find these posts, which is also in Search Console where you can see all the queries that your site is showing up for in the search results. For the other metric, how many people completed the form, it’s possible to set up a tracking goal in Analytics as well. And it would also help to track bounce rate from analytics and understand how people find the page from search results, via the search query information and Search Console.
We know all of this can be a lot. You have to translate your goals into concrete online metrics, you need to find the right tools, you need to track down specific stats in each tool, and you need to log into 17 different things every day to check in on everything. It’s tough. That’s why we made Site Kit. Site Kit is Google’s official WordPress plugin.
And it brings the most relevant stats and functionality from key Google products directly in your WordPress dashboard. So when you log into your site, you can have a look at how you’re doing right there in your dashboard, without needing to visit multiple other places or download stats somewhere to compare them in a spreadsheet or something. A simple, easy to understand dashboard will save you time and it will help you get insights instead of just numbers. Because everything is together in one place.
We made Site Kit extremely easy to set up. It places all the necessary verification and product snippets in the right places of your site on your behalf. So you can complete the setup with just a few clicks without having to figure out how to modify the source code of your site or do anything else complicated technically. You can literally set it up in a couple of minutes and in the process will also help you define your goals and translate them into online metrics by asking you a few simple questions.
For example, what’s the goal of your site? Is it to write a blog? Is it to publish news? Or something else? And what do you need most help with? For example, do you want to grow your audience? Do you want to expand to a new market? Or do you want to make your site faster? Once you figure out what your goals are, Site Kitwill give you tips, what metrics to put on your dashboard to customize it.
So you can track the most relevant things for you and your site. It will also give you updates on how you’re doing related to your goals over time. If you’ve done the setup, but your site is new to Search Console, it might take a day or two before you begin seeing stats in your dashboard. So take a break and come back in a bit to check out the first stats or set up some of the other Google products like analytics or AdSense.
If you’re already using them for your site, you’ll see data right away. With some data available over time, now it’s time to set a baseline. How many people visit the site per day? 20? 2,000? More? Is it different on the weekend? And what about where they visit from? All of this is available in Site Kit’s all traffic section, where you can filter by location, device and traffic source and also see trends over time. Set the expectations right.
Especially if your site is new, it might take a while to find your audience. It’s the same like opening up a new store in town, it’s not enough to just open, you have to think about attracting shoppers as well. Here’s some useful questions you can ask yourself to get orientated in how people experience your site: which are my most popular posts? What do they show up for in search? How do people find the site in general, in search or via other channels? Does that match my expectations? How would I like people to find me and what can I do to change that? Site Kit provides you a neat funnel using a combination of stats from both Search Console and Google Analytics, where you can trace how many times your site appeared in search, out of those people how many actually visited your site, out of them how many were on the page. And if they actually completed the goal that you wanted them to, in case you set up goals in Google Analytics. There’s also information about your most popular pages and also the top search queries how people find you in search available on the main dashboard.
You can get a detailed view for a specific page by using the search field on the dashboard or simply by accessing the stats directly from the admin bar at the top when you’re looking at the life page, and you’re logged into your site. There’s many useful things to check here. For example, you can see how people found this specific page in search because all their search queries are listed. Or you could check the bounce rate, which is available from Google Analytics.
And, if you run out of ideas what to write about, Site Kit has a really neat feature, which will show you unanswered questions directly from search that are related to your site’s content. So you can use these topic suggestions as inspiration to create new posts for your site, and give even more useful information, potentially get some new visitors.
Of course, all of this information is only useful if you take action on it. So how to do that? Here are a few examples. If Rosemary’s top queries are about restaurants in Singapore, but the pages with highest click through rate on her site are about hotels in Bangkok, it might be a good idea to consider readjusting what she writes about, adding more of the content that attracts more people to her site.
Similarly, if one of the main services she offers is planning trip itineraries to Japan, but she’s seeing that the top viewed pages on her site are about trips to Indonesia, maybe that’s a new business opportunity to expand her service offering. You need to continuously track what’s going on and adjust your strategy depending on what the metrics are telling you. This is an ongoing process; take into account factors like seasonality and how competitive your industry is, to put your site’s performance into perspective.
Site Kit will help you by showing you regular summaries of how you’re doing, as well as by celebrating milestones you’ve reached like your first 1000 visitors or the first $100 that you earn in AdSense. So let’s recap.
Here is how to make sure your site is working for you. Step one, translate your offline goals into online metrics. Step two, find the right tools for each metric. Step three, establish a baseline and analyze continuously. Step four, take action on the metrics, profit, and go back to one. And if you have a WordPress site, give Site Kit a try. We made it to support you grow, and help you evolve your online presence with an easy to understand dashboard and helpful tips to guide you along the way. You can find out more at https://sitekit.withgoogle.com/. Thanks for watching and goodbye.