If you haven’t connected your membership site to Google’s Webmaster Tools yet, there is a lot of valuable data that you’re missing out on. What is Webmaster Tools you ask? I’ll let them answer that question with this short video they’ve created.
The point really, is helping you perform better in Google’s search results, which means more customers for you.
Just to give you a taste of the kind of data you could be getting from Webmaster Tools here are a few screenshots from one site that I’m managing. This is the dashboard view and you can see the number of crawl errors Google has detected, the number of search queries, and whether or not you’ve submitted a site map. But there are so many more details you can get into, which you can see in the expanded sidebar. You can see who is linking to you, how many of your pages Google has indexed, you can request your site or specific pages to be crawled and indexed (very useful if you’ve made some changes to your site that you want to start having shown in search results quickly), as well as numerous other granular things that can help with your sites search performance.
This second screenshot shows some of the detail that you can get from connecting your site that difficult to get anywhere else. Google has recently switched to (not provided) for most of the organic keywords driving traffic to your site when you are looking at your analytics data, but in Webmaster tools, you can still get data about what those keywords actually are, what your average position is, the click through rate, clicks, and impressions. You can also see that data for the top pages on your site. Very useful data right at your fingertips.
So go and hook your site up to Google Webmaster Tools and start getting this valuable data. To double your value, hook your site up to Bing Webmaster Tools as well and get all sorts of useful data from the two biggest search engines about how your site is doing and insights on how to improve it.
