You might also just want to know how much traffic a website is getting to see if they have some traffic sources you might want to look into for your own website.

Whatever your reasons, let’s talk about how to see how much traffic a website is getting.

How to See How Much Traffic a Website is Getting

There are a few options to spy on a competitor or any website to see how much traffic they’re getting. While there’s a lot of premium options, there are a lot of free services and hacks, as well.

Similarweb

Similarweb is a freemium service in that they have features you can pay for, but as far as how to see how much traffic a website is getting, that aspect is free.

Above is a snapshot of a website to give you an idea of the information Similar Web gives you for free.

You can see the year a website was founded, the industry, its approximated number of employees and revenue annually, global, country, and category rankings, and some Google Analytics type stats.

This includes the total number of visits for the last month on record.

Ubersuggest

Neil Patel’s tool gives you 3 free website searches a day.

This tool gives you a more realistic snapshot of the traffic the site is receiving, particularly in terms of targeted traffic because it focuses on organic monthly traffic.

This number is closer to the real picture, as well, filtering out bot based traffic.

Scrolling down, there’s more information which lets you know a handful of the top keywords the website is ranking for to bring in this traffic.

It’s more of an SEO tool and is better for spying on your competitors if you’re trying to grow your own traffic.

SEMRush

SEMRush has a tool which requires a free account to use, but it gives you similar information to these other services.

The above screenshot is the only information you can get from the tool without a premium membership, but it gives you similar information to Similarweb’s tool.

This again doesn’t filter out bot traffic and traffic from non-organic sources. If nothing else, it’s good to check against the other tools.

Why Do Traffic Estimator Stats Differ?

It’s a good time to re-emphasize that traffic estimator tools like these are just that. Even the ones which claim to get their stats from the sites themselves tend to vary wildly.

ScreamingFrog did a small case study comparing a handful of popular tools, analyzing the traffic data for over a dozen of sites between them against the actual numbers reported by the sites themselves.

The tools were accurate with some sites, and off with some others.

These tools get their stats by looking at the keywords these sites are ranking for, comparing this to the search volume for these keywords, and putting together estimates accordingly taking their rankings into account.

It’s difficult for these tools to figure on all of the longtail keywords any one site is ranking for, particularly a bigger one.

All this to say one more time that these tools just work to provide estimates.

To get the best estimate on a site, your best bet would be to use a lot of these tools and average the results out.

It’s arguably the most important component of the Google Search Console because you can use it to improve the rankings of every page on your website.

Google Search Console Performance Report

Before you can use this tool, you need to add your website to Google Search Console which I show how to do in that linked to page. Note that the tool can’t retroactively give you information from before began tracking your site, so do it now if you haven’t already.

Once it’s connected, login to your GSC account and click on the “Performance” tab in the menu on the left of the dashboard.

You’ll get some instant stats and a color coded graph for the date range of your choice like above.

Clicking on any of the major stats (total clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average position) will add or remove them from the graph.

Below the graph, you’ll find different ways to filter down the stats shown in the graph to give you more specific and helpful data.

These categories include by search query, page (on your site), country, device, etc.

Each of these categories can be sorted largest to smallest (or vice versa) via the columns:

This data is straightforward enough to understand on its own.

Let’s get to the practical use of it to get more traffic to your website.

How to Get More Traffic With Google Search Console Performance Stats

We can use Google Search Console’s Performance stats to see which (worthwhile) keywords we’re already ranking relatively well for so that we can update them accordingly.

It’s the keywords which we’re already ranking in the top 10 for or just outside of the top 10 which we want to adjust. Sometimes doing this alone will help us jump up one or multiple spots which can result in a huge different in traffic for that page as this estimated graph shows:

The number one ranking site in Google on average gets roughly ONE THIRD of all of the organic traffic for its keyword. The top three ranking pages together earn TWO THIRDS of all total clicks for the keyword they’re ranking for.

This makes sense, for two reasons.

One, a ranking in the top three means greater visibility. These are the first things you see when you do a Google search, so your eyes gravitate here first.

Two, the top ranking sites in Google generally have the most built in trust. Most people (mostly rightfully) assume that the pages which are ranking at the top have the highest quality and best match for their search.

So if you’re hovering in the bottom half of the first page of Google, just coming up a few spots makes a HUGE difference in clicks.

The same goes if you’re hovering at the top of page 2. If you’re not on page one in Google, your page almost might as well not exist because you’ll get next to no traffic. Making a tweak or two to boost your ranking to crack onto page one will start bringing traffic to that page which can then raise your ranking further (which I’ll get to in a moment).

So, we have a tool in the Google Search Console Performance stats to show us where we’re generally ranking for most keywords.

Let’s get down to the process of actually sifting through that data to get more traffic.

Step 1 – Refine Date Range to 28 Days

By default, GSC Performance is set to show the last 3 months. While it can be a nice ego boost to see more clicks, we want to refine the date range to the last 28 days.

Why? Because 90 days is going to skew our numbers to show potentially outdated stats and paint the wrong picture in where we’re ranking.

We’re going for immediate results here, so a more recent sample size will help us better isolate the keywords/pages on our site which just need a little push right now.

You can set whatever date range you want, but I find 28 days to be a nice compromise.

Step 2 – Filter Rows

Next, we want to tick the circle in the top right of the stats section and click “Impressions”.

This will allow us to filter out queries which aren’t getting many searches, prioritizing the keywords we’re currently ranking for that people are also searching for. Change “Equals” in the top left to “Greater Than” and set whichever minimum number of impressions you want to focus on.

Remember that this is the number of impressions that your page got total in that date range for that keyword.

Step 3 – Sort By Highest Position

Now click on the position and sort it from best rank to lowest. Note that unlike clicks or impression, this is the average ranking position your page had over the date range.

In the above example, I’ve filtered out keywords I’m ranking for which don’t have AT LEAST 100 impressions total over the last 28 days. These results are sorted by the keyword I’m ranking best for to the worst.

To put it another way and using that first keyword as an example, my page which is ranking for that keyword showed up 131 times in Google’s SERPs when people searched for that keyword.

While I’m ranking well for the keyword, I’m getting an abysmal CTR of less than 1% according to GSC.

And while the earliest pie chart was just an average estimate of what the number 1 ranking page on Google should get in terms of percentage of clicks, I should be getting a lot more than 1%.

This tells me that something is wrong in my Google search listing for that page which is turning people off. Admittedly this is a very old page which is in need of an update to both the title and description to better encourage people to click through.

Incidentally I put together an entire tutorial on how to improve CTR in Google search and that page would undoubtedly benefit from everything I cover in that resource.

This is a good time to mention that I went ahead and did a physical Google search for that keyword and saw that in reality my page is ranking #8 for it today. I even updated GSC to show the most recent stats from yesterday and was still quoted as ranking #1.

The point of mentioning that is that these stats should be taken with a grain of salt; sometimes they require a bit more analysis on your own.

Step 4 – Make a List of the Prioritized URLs You Want to Update

The only thing left to do after you see the keywords is to identify the pages ranking for them on your site.

Click on any keyword/query you want to check on to isolate it, then click on “Pages” to see the page on your site currently ranking for that query.

Make a list of the URLs and the query (or queries) which could be better used in the context of that page to improve rankings or boost CTR.

Sometimes this query will be the main keyword you’re trying to rank for, sometimes it will be more of a secondary or LSI keyword.

In the latter case, I might just weave that keyword into the description and better into the content of the page itself without taking away from the main keyword. This can help our ranking and improve our CTR (which in turn also improves our ranking).

Rinse and repeat this process for every keyword and page which meets your criteria and you’ll quickly have a list of pages which just need a few tweaks to improve their CTR and earn you more traffic.

Note that your criteria will vary from another webmasters. If you’ve got a new site with low traffic and every little bit counts, you’ll likely want to set the bar a lot lower in terms of impressions a query has to generate.

With a larger, higher trafficked site, you don’t have as much time and the bar is likely going to be higher. In other words, a query might need to generate a lot more impressions in the same amount of time for it to be worth the trouble of better optimizing its page for it.

Regardless, this is a great way to use the Google Search Console Performance stats to generate more traffic to your site.

In Conclusion

With the right filtering and sorting, the GSC Performance section can identify keywords/pages you’re already ranking for which, with a couple of tweaks, could improve substantially. The method is essentially:

• Refine the results to a recent period of time to focus on keywords you’re ranking well for right now.
• Filter the results by a minimum number of impressions (which you’re comfortable with).
• Sort the results to focus on the best ranking keywords.
• Make a list of the pages and make the updates to better tailor them and their search appearances for the keywords they’re already ranking for to improve CTR and gain more traffic.

Bear in mind that this is just one method to finding the URLs you need to update. You could also filter by the CTR to see the ones which could definitely be improved compared to their ranking.

In this case you would tick the filter circle and select “CTR” and set that to any keyword which is BELOW a certain number, then sort by the ranking again. This will show you underperforming pages on your site, as well.

I prefer the method covered in this article, though, because average CTR can range from various factors. It’s the impressions that show where the value lies in the pages you’re already ranking for.

This is definitely a work smarter, not harder method, to leverage the work you’ve already done, so get to work and enjoy that extra traffic!

It’s a good idea to periodically check here for any coverage issues your site is experiencing to ensure that every page which should be appearing in Google actually is.

Let’s talk about how to take the snapshot that the Google Search Console Coverage tool gives you and fix your content with it.

First, sign up for a free account and connect it to your website if you haven’t already.

Clicking on the “Coverage” link on the left side of the dashboard brings up a snapshot like the example below:

Clicking on each of the four tabs (as well as the “Impressions” box) reflects that statistic in the graph below them.

You can see the number of URLs on your site (the total indexed and not indexed), the number of impressions you get each day over the date range.

Lastly, you can see the number of URLs in each color-coded status which we’ll breakdown now.

Error

This will give you a list of all of the pages on your site which Google can’t crawl due to an error.

This shouldn’t be confused with pages which you specifically set to not be indexed like administrative pages, private content pages, or non-canonical versions of pages.

Of all the pages which aren’t being indexed, it’s a good idea to prioritize these because it can reveal pages which are unresponsive on your site for various reasons.

GSC will specify the error associated with each page if you have any listed here.

You can check out a list of the coverage errors you might see here for individual pages which is keeping them from being indexed.

It’s also a good idea to start here because most of these are technical errors and will be a quick fix.

Valid With Warnings

Valid with warnings means that the page(s) listed here is in Google’s index, but there’s an issue Google wants you to know about.

A common example of an error which might appear here is when Google sees that a URL has been blocked by your robots.txt file but it indexed it anyway.

This will return the warning “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”.

This can happen to URLs which are being found via links from other pages on or off your site.

So while you’ve intentionally chosen to block the URL in the robots.txt file on your site, Google is still finding and indexing that URL by way of those links.

By including the URL in this “Valid With Warnings” section, Google is letting you know of a possible issue so that you can act accordingly.

You can add the noindex meta tag to the page itself or even remove the URL using the removal tool to ensure that it stays out of Google’s index.

Valid

This is a list of all of the URLs which are currently indexed in Google.

Its bots have successfully found and crawled the URL and added it to Google’s index. In other words, if you search for any of the URLs listed here, they should appear in Google.

Conversely, it’s worth mentioning that if you have any specific URLs you don’t want to appear in Google, you can search for them here to ensure that they’re not indexed.

Otherwise, both you and Google have done your jobs and no additional actions are necessary on these URLs.

Excluded

The “Excluded” tab in the Google Search Console Coverage section can be the most nebulous of the bunch.

This lists all of the URLs on your site which are not currently in Google’s index.

In the domain example at the top of this page, you might have noticed that there’s roughly three times as many excluded URLs as valid, with 730 valid and 2.48k excluded.

In other words, less than 25% of the site’s content is appearing in Google. That sounds pretty bad, right?

The important thing to keep in mind is that most of the URLs appearing here are non-canonical versions of pages which are actually indexed. The bulk of these will typically be the canonical URLs with extra parameters added to them.

With that in mind, it’s normal to have a lot more excluded URLs than valid URLs listed here.

If you scroll beneath the graph, you’ll see a breakdown of the reasons these URLs have been excluded:

Clicking on any one of these blocks gives you a list of the URLs affected by the issue in question.

Most of these are self-explanatory, but let’s take a closer look at the first two which account for the lion’s share of the excluded URLs, those which are discovered and crawled but currently not indexed.

Discovered – Currently Not Indexed

After clicking on the “discovered currently not indexed” block, I got a list of URLs which Google is aware of but hasn’t crawled:

Most of the URLs listed here (for this example site) have a “#main” extension. Visiting any of the URLs takes me to an image on that respective URL’s page.

This is a product of how the site is set up and its theme. In this case, I want to filter all instances of this example out.

To do this, click “Export” at the top of the page to export the results to a spreadsheet of your choice.

After filtering these out in Excel, I’m left with 28 entries, half of which are WordPress specific tag or category URLs.

Wanting to focus on actual pages of written content themselves, I have about a dozen URLs.

According to Google, “Discovered – currently not indexed”refers to URLs which were found but not crawled.

Typically it’s because it was going to crawl the URL but it was expected to overload the site, so the crawl was rescheduled/there is no last crawl date listed.

The URLs in this example site are years old at this point, so it’s possible they just got overlooked.

As I laid out in my overview on how to add a page to Google, you can manually request indexing by entering the URL in GSC and clicking “request indexing” like below:

Check back after a few days. If it’s still listed as “Discovered…” or has moved to the next one, it likely has to do with the content itself.

I address this in the next section: URLs which have been crawled but are still not indexed.

Crawled – Currently Not Indexed

You might actually have more results in the “crawled – currently not indexed” pile than those which it hasn’t crawled.

These are pages which Google has actively looked at on your site and decided not to add to its index.

Awkward.

I looked at the URLs listed on my test site as “crawled – currently not indexed” and most of them are similar to the “#main” issue. These are URLs which I don’t want showing in Google.

Still, there are plenty of actual articles which SHOULD at least exist in Google.

I’ve talked a bit about the reasons Google isn’t indexing a page which it has crawled before.

More often than not, if you can rule out technical errors, it comes down to weak content.

Again, awkward.

In inspecting a handful of the URLs on my example site, I can see that these are generally older, shorter posts which are thin on content in general.

There’s no additional content outside of text for many of these, so these would benefit from adding images, a video if possible, and even adding to and updating the content itself in each one.

With these updates and even specifying that you’ve updated the article within it, try resubmitting the URL to GSC.

In Summary

The “Coverage” section in Google Search Console can tell us about issues with pages on our site which are keeping them from appearing in Google.

This may be a technical error or something more subjective like weak content.

In the case of a technical error, the tool can advise you as to precisely what the issue is.

If it’s more of a content issue, you can tweak the content accordingly and resubmit. Once that page gets indexed, you can use that as a clue to get an idea of the kind of content Google believes offers value.

Either way, this tool allows you to get a good idea of which pages are in need of what kind of tune up.

You should pay attention to the “Coverage” section on a regular basis to make sure that every URL you want to appear in Google is visible.

Among the things I mentioned, I mentioned the importance of having a sitemap. A sitemap makes your site more navigable, particular for search engines which can help your content be found and consequently understood and indexed accordingly.

It’s very simple to share your sitemap with Google Search Console, so let’s talk about how to add a sitemap in Google Search Console.

1 – Create a Sitemap

First thing’s first; obviously in how to add a sitemap in Google Search Console you need a sitemap to submit.

I wrote a short guide on how to create a sitemap for your website but there are plenty of free plugins which will do this for you.

These plugins make a list of all of the pages on your site then create a URL where your sitemap will exist. You can go to this URL and see that it’s essentially just a list of links to the various pages on your site. The plugin updates your sitemap as you add new content, as well.

2 – Create a Google Search Console Account

I’ve recently talked about both how to add a website to Google Search Console so refer to that if you don’t already have a GSC account.

This is a free cloud based application from Google which is useful for better understanding how Google sees your site.

More importantly, it even gives recommendations on how you can improve your rankings.

You can also link your GSC and Google Analytics accounts if you have one (see how to connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics) to get even more detailed information about your site.

3 – Add Sitemap to Google Search Console

Now how to add a sitemap in Google Search Console. When in your GSC account, locate the “sitemap” option in the dashboard on the left.

Now enter the URL for your generated sitemap on your site. Typically it will be your domain.xml, but refer to your plugin if that URL doesn’t work.

Once your sitemap URL is entered properly, click “submit”. If it worked, you’ll get this message:

As it says, Google will check back from time to time to make sure it has the most updated picture of your site.

This will help to ensure that Google can find the various URLs which make up your site and index them.

While it’s an important step, don’t rely solely on a sitemap to have Google index your content.

While you’re still in your GSC account, add the URL of each of your posts into the search field one at a time to see if Google has indexed them or not. If a particular URL hasn’t been indexed, I recommend manually requested that it gets indexed (see how to add a page to Google).

If the URL has been indexed, it can tell you right there if there are any issues which might be hurting its rankings and will tell you how to resolve them.

It’s a good idea to do this every so often to make sure that all of your URLs are indexed and issue free.

But for now, you now know how to add a sitemap in Google Search Console!

While a bit more involved than adding a site to Google Analytics (see how to add a website to Google Analytics), how to add a website to Google Search Console is still a relatively straightforward process, especially if you follow this short guide.

Let’s talk about how to add a website to Google Search Console.

First, navigate to https://search.google.com/search-console/.

You’ll be prompted to add a domain to track. You can either enter it as a specific URL prefix (like the WWW. version of your site) or all URLs. Choose domain to do the latter and enter your domain without any prefix like the image below:

When you click continue, it will give you a string of text which you need to copy into a TXT record on your hosting account for that site.

Navigate to the cPanel of your hosting provider and select “Zone Editor” in the “Domains” section:

Find your domain (if you have more than one on your hosting account) and click “Manage”.

Now select “Add Record” to bring up a new record to input data into. Select “TXT” as the type and it will look like this:

In “Valid zone name”, enter your domain without any prefix. In the case of this site, it would just be angryseoer.com.

In the “Text” field, paste in the string of text Google Search Console gave you and click “Save Record”.

That’s all you need to do. Click “Verify” and it should find the the new verification that you are authorized to add your website to Google Search Console:

You can now select your domain from the dropdown menu in the top left of your Google Search Console account.

Like with Google Analytics, it may take a day or so to begin collecting data.

With your site added to Google Search Console, you can get recommendations on how to improve your search presence, see any issues affecting your site, manually request that new or existing pages get added to Google’s index, and more.

You can get additional information by connecting your Search Console and Analytics accounts together. Refer to my tutorial on how to connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics for more information on this.

For now, congratulations on adding your website to Google Search Console!

User engagement is important to Google because it’s essentially its own users directly telling it which pages have worthwhile content based on their interactions. By monitoring the interactions of the millions of people who use its Chrome browser, Google can see this same information about any website.

If your page is performing poorly in any of the following 6 categories, you may want to take a look at your content and tweak accordingly. Doing so will create better content for your visitors and consequently improve your rankings.

User Engagement in Google Analytics

Click-Through Rate in SERPs

The first bit of user engagement in Google Analytics takes place on Google itself, but it’s an important one which has a huge bearing on your rankings.

The click-through rate in Google (see how to check your Google CTR) impacts your ranking because Google sees it as a reflection of your page’s relevance to a search query.

Improving your CTR (see how to improve CTR in Google search) says to Google that your page is a better fit for the search query, and this alone can help you outrank the other pages vying for those same keywords.

Make sure your title and description both stand out from the other listings and encourage people to click on your page. In some cases, you might even think about adding rich snippets (see what are rich snippets) to further help your content stand out in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Traffic

More clicks equals more traffic in general. It’s an unfortunate reality, but a page’s (and site’s) traffic levels actually play a sizable role in rankings.

This is because, similar to your CTR, Google understandably believes that the more traffic a page gets, the more perceived value it has.

Like with so many things in SEO, traffic begets more traffic, so check out my complete and ultimate resource of 51 website traffic sources to inundate your site and pages with traffic and make Google take notice of you.

Bounce Rate

Ah the dreaded bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave directly from the page they arrive at with little to no interaction on the page.

This term essentially implies that the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for on a page. As such, we want to get our bounce rate as low as possible.

How to Lower Bounce Rate

More Relevant Title and Meta Description – As I touched on earlier, your page’s title and meta description are what appear in Google search. This is all anyone in Google has to go on when deciding whether or not to click on your listing in Google.

While we want to make them as enticing as possible in order to encourage people to click-through to our site, misleading people with clickbaity titles and descriptions we can’t back up with the actual content on the page will only result in a sky-high bounce rate.

Make sure that your content on the actual page is in perfect harmony with what the title and description promise.

Utilize Relevant Internal Links – Including internal links throughout your copy is a great way to keep people on your site and thus lower your bounce rate. Make sure that the links are hyper relevant to the content on the page to increase the odds that visitors will go to those pages.

At the end of the article, offer links to other relevant pages, as well. Many themes have a built in option to do this or there are plugins which will do it, as well.

Have an Easy to Navigate Site – If someone can’t easily find what they’re looking for on your site, they’ll quickly leave. Make sure you have a clean design, a simple menu which is featured on every page which has links to all of the most important pages on your site, and a highly visible search bar to assist visitors to find virtually any page of content on your site.

Time on Site/Page

Time on site is just that: the amount of time someone spends on your site.

It’s somewhat connected with your bounce rate, but rather than just a simple measurement of whether or not more than one page was viewed, it’s a measurement of exactly how much time someone spends on either your site as a whole or a page.

The more time spent on the site or a page, the better.

Therefore, create longer form content in the form of longer articles, embed videos on your site as this keeps a person on your site while the video plays, and use the previously mentioned bounce rate tips to encourage more time on your site.

Pages Viewed

Hopefully you’re seeing a pattern here, but the idea with user engagement is always to keep people on your site. This extends to pages viewed, as well. The more pages viewed on a site, the better.

Here site layout/design and relevant internal linking are both huge in encouraging more pages viewed by spreading around existing traffic to your site.

Repeat Visits

There’s arguably no better measurement of the quality of the content on a page than repeat visits. Repeat visits are just that, when the same person (or at least someone using the same browser) returns to the same page on your site which they’ve previously visited.

This screams to Google that this is content worth ranking if someone went to the trouble to return to that page.

Certain types of content lend themselves to repeat visits more than others. These include:

Pages With Infographics – An infographic is an image which contains information. Information is more succinct and easily digestible in this format, not to mention more shareable.

Longer Articles – Pages which contain longer articles tend to perform better in Google for a number of reasons. Obviously they provide more information, but they also encourage repeat visits if there’s too much to take in through one viewing.

Informative Lists – Similar to an infographic, an informative list is a neatly structured offering of information. This is the kind of content which earns bookmarks and return visits.

Making the recommended changes can help improve these types of user engagement in Google Analytics which will in turn improve your rankings and earn you more traffic.

The analytics software shows the practical effects of changes you make to your website, even in real-time. It’s especially helpful in allowing you to create and track goals for your website. Ultimately, if you’re at all interested in improving your website and getting more traffic, Google Analytics can help you do it.

For all of this, I always recommend that you add your website to Google Analytics as soon as possible. Even if you don’t actively check your analytics, you’ll still want to add your website to it ASAP because you can’t retroactively track traffic before you connected Google Analytics.

Let’s talk how to add a website to Google Analytics in 60 seconds.

Add a Website to Google Analytics

Before you can add a website to Google Analytics, you need a free account. Navigate to analytics.google.com and create an account.

The first thing to do is create an account name. This is the most macro level name; I recommend naming it after your brand.

You then have to specify to Google which data sharing you wish to engage in in the account and data sharing settings. I recommend ticking “Google Products and Services” as this is required to give you access to more in depth tracking.

Next, name your property itself. You’re likely going to be tracking your website, so you might name this “My Website” or “(Your Brand) Website”.

You can also specify your time zone and currency, that latter of which is for tracking goal values if you choose to set that up:

Lastly, you can specify your business/brand/site’s industry and indicate how you want to use GA:

After you submit this, you’ll have to agree to Google’s terms and specify what you want GA to email you about.

After you’ve gone through these steps, you’ll be dropped in the “Data Stream” tab in GA and prompted to set up your first data stream. This essentially just means connecting a website or app to your GA account to track.

Select “Web” as the platform to track your website and enter your URL (specifying HTTP or HTTPS on the left) and name this specific data stream. This is the last name, I promise, so just name it “My Website” again. The different levels of granularity in naming apply to larger businesses which are tracking multiple properties. Here we just want to track our website:

Now we just need to add a website to Google Analytics. After clicking “create stream”, locate the “Tagging Instructions” section and click the arrow to expand the “Global Site Tag” section.

This gives you the code we need to add a website to Google Analytics (connecting the two):

There are two ways to add the gtag.js to your website:

1 – You can manually copy and paste this into the head section of every page of your website (or an equivalent php page, i.e. “header.php”). Simply copy and paste the code exactly as GA presents it to you into the head section to track that page.

2 – You can use a plugin. If you’re using WP, I like the MonsterInsights plugin as it allows you to connect your website to Google Analytics with a couple of clicks. Simply install and activate the plugin on your website. Then select “Connect MonsterInsights” from its settings tab. This will prompt you to select your Google account associated with your GA account. Agree to its access terms, and pick the profile for the account you want to track. You should have only option if this is a new account, the one you just set up:

The added benefit of using this plugin is that it provides a snapshot of your analytics within your WP dashboard without having to go to GA itself.

After a day or so you should begin seeing data being tracked from that stream. You can see stats about the people coming to your website (including real-time) and more importantly begin setting up goals for your site.

Setting up goals helps condition you to strive to improve your website and the content you create with a clear purpose in mind.

I’ll talk more about setting up goals in the future, but once set up, GA will provide insights as to how you can better achieve those goals.

But for now, you’ve successfully added a website to Google Analytics, so congrats!

Enjoy seeing the stats which represent the fruits of your labor from making all of that great content!

One last thing to mention is that I recommend connecting your new analytics account to a Google Search Console account to get additional information (see how to connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics for more information as well as information on how to add website to Search Console).