Track Search Queries in WordPress with Google Analytics
Tracking queries and traffic of a website is an important measure regarding SEO. Luckily, we have Google Analytics to do that for us without charging any costs. Google Analytics provides a vast, in-depth analysis of your website on a daily basis. It helps you keeping track of your daily visitors, page views, most viewed post & pages, and lots of other important things.
Analytics also supports tracking Search Queries in a website, all you need to do is enable Site Search Tracking. For WordPress users, here is a short guide to set up Search Track on Google Analytics.
- Sign into your Google Analytics account and click Settings on the right hand side. Refer below screenshot.
- Choose your site’s profile from the left-hand site menu. If you have only one site in your Google Analytics account, then it will show you that only site’s profile by default.
- Now, on your site’s profile, look for the Profile Settings link. Locate it with the help of below screenshot:
- Now, on the Profile Settings section, look for Site Search Settings section and select Do Track Site Search. In the Query Parameter field, enter “s” (without quotes).
This is because WordPress search uses “s” as it’s query parameter. Just make a search on your WordPress site (with traditional WordPress search), you’ll find the URL of search results like this: yoursite.com/s?=queryIf you want to see each query parameter independently, check the Strip query parameters out of URL option.
Save changes by clicking Apply.
After implementing these steps, you’ll see a link saying Site Search under Content section in the left sidebar of Google Analytics. You can check the tracked search stats there. The results won’t show up there immediately after implementing above steps, it may take 1-2 days to track your WordPress search. So, be patient!