Since Google is a search engine company, it is only natural for them to burst at the seams with SEO tools to improve your domain’s rankings. Whether it’s Google Analytics, AdSense, Adwords, Search Console or Tag Manager, Google wants to make your life as easy as possible and get the best rankings for your website.
The problem is that as more and more services come along, they become a little bit fragmented and disconnected. Who has time to go into five or more Google SEO tools each day to check traffic stats, ad revenue, and the last things to fix? You are too busy watching dog skateboarding on YouTube. So things start to fail and end up being forgotten.
So when Google introduced the Site Kit for WordPress, everyone was thrilled because you can now see everything in your WordPress dashboard. If you have an SEO developer on your team, they can see everything too, and you don’t need to tell them your Google SEO account login details.
Setup Google Site Kit
The Site Kit has been in a fairly lengthy beta and in my experience it still contains some bugs. But Google is methodically tackling any remaining nuances with regular plugin updates. But you should still expect bumps in the road when you tune it.
- After installing the WordPress plugin, you will see a new option on the left sidebar.
- Click Site Kit and then Dashboard.
- You will now see a button prompting you to start configuring. It’s very simple, but before you start, you need to make sure that you have configured your site in Google Search Console
- After you click the Start Customization button, you will be prompted to verify ownership of your website by logging into Search Console So click on “Sign in with Google”.
- After entering your login information, you will see what information Sitekit wants to receive from your account. Since you are using a Google account to use the Google service, I think we can say with confidence that it is safe to continue. Click “Allow”.
- Immediately, you will see the Search Console statistics populating your WordPress Sitekit section. But now it will prompt you to connect to various other services such as AdSense, Analytics, and PageSpeed ??Insights. You don’t need to connect to them, but if you have real accounts on these platforms, why not use them? Just click on “Connect Service” and login as before.
- The page will then confirm if you are successfully connected.
- If you are using Optimization and / or Tag Manager, you can also log into these services. But since I don’t use them, I didn’t bother.
I have to point out that if you turn on Adsense, then Google will place Adsense ads wherever they want on your site, without your control or input. If you are concerned about this, leave Adsense disabled.
Troubleshoot installation errors
The biggest problem with installing Sitekit right now is that sometimes it doesn’t work when installed. In particular, you often get a redirect_uri_mismatch error when trying to connect services.
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I’ve often found that leaving this for a while and coming back to it later would suddenly make it work. Another option is to go to SiteKit–> Preferences and click the Reset button. This will disable everything and take you back to the beginning of the setup wizard to start over. First, you will need to go to your Google account settings and revoke the permissions for SiteKit.
If that doesn’t work, uninstall the plugin and use an FTP program to remove all traces of SiteKit from your domain. Then revoke the Sitekit permissions on your Google account, reinstall the plugin, and start over.
Hopefully these teething problems will be temporary.
Display Google SEO data in the WordPress backend
Now that the plugin is installed, let’s see what it shows you.
- First, where is your search traffic coming from.
- Search funnel becomes more specific based on impressions, clicks, unique visitors, and goals achieved.
- PageSpeed ??Insights tells me how fast my website is loading. Judging by these figures, I obviously have a lot of work to do in this direction.
- The Adsense section shows my current earnings. As you can see, I will not retire early anytime soon.
- The last part shows my current popular articles on my site. Each one gives me the number of clicks and impressions, and the Adsense section tells me how much money I made from this article.
SiteKit not only saves you time as you don’t have to constantly log in and out, but it can help your SEO developer and even give your writing team an easy way to find out which articles are performing well.
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