I embarrassingly discovered the other day that I was not receiving metrics or analytics about keyword queries in the Google Analytics console. It turns out that problem was twofold. First, I didn’t have the SSL version of my site enabled in the Google webmaster tools and second, I was serving a cached version of my sitemap that was several months out of date.
To give you an idea of how this issue manifested itself, and how I discovered that there were issues in the first place – here’s what my search keywords were showing as in the Google Analytics console.
Clearly the data is less than useful. The solution to this problem is pretty easy to fix at least.
Fixing the webmaster properties
Open up the Google webmasters site (you should have this setup already, if not go ahead and get signed up and add your WordPress site). If you have recently updated your site to use https, make sure you add a new property in the webmaster tools for the https version of your site that matches your http version.
Doing this will tell google to keep track of search queries for the https version of your site, which should be the default after swtiching. After adding the new https property and indexing it, give it a day or two to start collecting metrics, and check back. Now when you check your search query traffic in the webmaster tools you should start to see all of the search results.
Also be sure to update properties to use https in both the Webmaster console as well as the Analytics console. For example, in the Analytics console under Admin -> Property settings -> default URL, there is an option to use http or https. Likewise, in the webmaster console there is an option for defaulting to http, which is buried in the Google Analytics interface under Admin -> Property settings -> Search Console. Make sure you update ALL of the site settings to use https.
NOTE: It can take some time for queries to begin showing up in the Google Analytics console (it took about two days for them to start showing up for my site after fixing all the https references).
Fixing sitemaps issues
If you find that Google isn’t indexing and using all of your posts and pages, the next thing to look at the sitemaps. A quick way to know if you your sitemaps file is doing its job is to pull open the sitemaps, which can be found under the Crawl -> Sitemaps menu.
The above shows what a healthy sitemap index looks like (after I corrected the problem). There is a button located in the top left of this view that can help you test your sitemap while you are updating your settings. First check for any items in the “issues” column. Also, if the “processed” date here isn’t recent then there is probably an issue. One last thing to check – if there are either no entries in this view or fewer then you expect, something is probably not working.
There are many more knobs and dials you can adjust in the webmaster tools, so if you haven’t played with them much I would recommend spending some time and poking around.
I should quickly mention that my solution assumes that you are using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. If you’re not using this plugin, and you are either 1) new to WordPress or 2) don’t want to manage your sitemaps file manually, I suggest you enable it. It makes sitemap management so much easier.
After you have the plugin turned on, navigate to your blog settings for sitemaps, which can be located in Dashboard -> Settings -> XML-Sitemap. Clicking the popup should bring up a page similar to the following.
First, make sure everything looks correct in the settings. If you are setting this up for the first time you might need to configure some of the settings. For example, make sure the site name matches the listing, and the options to notify search indexers are all turned on.
When I was troubleshooting the search queries not getting set, I navigated to this menu and immediately noticed that the plugin was showing a warning about using a cached version of my sitemaps.xml file. To fix this warning, there should be an option to remove the cached versions.
Next, there should be an option near the top of the sitemap settings to “notify search engines about your sitemap”. After you have adjusted all the sitemap settings and cleared the cached sitemaps file, click that link to trigger a ping to the search indexers.
Be aware that the crawling process may take up to a few days to index and update so be patient.
