How to Connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics

A website that looks great but gets no organic traffic is like a billboard in the desert. To avoid this, you’re probably using Google Search Console (GSC) to monitor your SEO health and Google Analytics 4 to understand visitor behavior. This guide will show you how to connect them, unlocking a much deeper understanding of your website's performance by combining SEO metrics with on-site engagement data.

Why Connect Google Search Console to GA4?

On their own, each tool gives you a specific piece of the performance puzzle. Google Search Console tells you how people find your site through Google Search, showing you which queries they used, your ranking for those queries, search impressions, and clicks. Google Analytics 4 picks up where GSC leaves off, telling you what people do after they land on your site - which pages they visit, how long they stay, and whether they complete goals like signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

When you keep these two data sets separate, you're looking at an incomplete picture. Connecting them in GA4 lets you see the full user journey in one place. You can finally answer crucial questions like:

• Which search queries are driving the most engaged and highest-converting traffic?
• Which of my landing pages are performing best in organic search, and what do users do after landing on them?
• Are there any keywords I’m getting tons of impressions for but few clicks? (This could be a chance to improve title tags and meta descriptions).
• How does organic search traffic compare to traffic from other channels like social media or paid ads in terms of bounce rate and conversion?

With a few simple clicks, you stop guessing and start making data-backed decisions that can seriously improve both your SEO and your website's user experience.

Before You Begin: The Prerequisites

The process is straightforward, but you need a couple of things in place before you start. It’s best to confirm these now to avoid any roadblocks later.

• Verified GSC Property: You must have a Google Search Console account set up and the ownership of your website property verified.
• GA4 Property Setup: You need an active Google Analytics 4 property that is collecting data for the same website.
• Admin-Level Permissions: This is the most common sticking point. You need to have ‘Editor’ role on the Google Analytics 4 property and be a ‘Verified owner’ on the Google Search Console property. If you're managing accounts for a client or aren't the primary owner, you may need to request these permissions.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Linking GSC and GA4

Once you've confirmed you have the correct permissions, the linking process itself only takes a couple of minutes. Here’s exactly what you need to do.

Step 1: Navigate to the Admin Section in GA4

Log in to your Google Analytics 4 account. In the bottom-left corner of the GA4 screen, you’ll see a gear icon labeled ‘Admin.’ Click on it.

Step 2: Find the Product Links

You are now on the Admin page, which has two main columns: ‘Account’ and ‘Property.’ Look at the ‘Property’ column. Scroll down until you find the ‘Product Links’ section. In this list, click on ‘Search Console Links.’

Step 3: Start the Linking Process

On the Search Console Links page, you will see a blue button in the top right corner that says ‘Link.’ Click it to begin setting up the connection.

Step 4: Choose a Search Console Property

A new panel will slide out called ‘Create a new Search Console link.’ The first step is ‘Choose a Search Console property.’ Here you’ll click ‘Choose Accounts.’

You'll be shown a list of all the Google Search Console properties that you have ‘Owner’ verification for. Select the property that exactly matches the website you’re tracking with this GA4 property, then click ‘Confirm.’

Quick tip: Be precise here. If your website is https://www.yourdomain.com, make sure you select the Search Console property for that exact URL, not http://yourdomain.com. If you set up a ‘Domain property’ in GSC (which covers all subdomains and protocols), that is usually the best option.

Step 5: Select Your Web Stream

After confirming your GSC account, you’ll be taken to the next step: ‘Select web stream.’ Click ‘Select’ and choose the corresponding data stream for your website from the list that appears. For most users, there will only be one to choose from.

Step 6: Review and Submit

Finally, you’ll move to the ‘Review and submit’ step. Double-check that everything looks correct: the Search Console property and the GA4 web stream you selected are pairing up correctly. If it’s all good, click the ‘Submit’ button.

That's it! You'll see a ‘Link created’ notification. Now, your GSC and GA4 accounts can share data. Be patient as it can take up to 48 hours for the new data and reports to fully appear in your GA4 property.

Where to Find Your Search Console Data in GA4

After waiting a day or two, you'll want to check out your shiny new reports. By default, GA4 often doesn't show them in the main navigation. You'll need to "publish" the collection yourself. Don't worry, it is an easy fix.

1. Open the Reporting Library

In the left-hand navigation menu of GA4, go to the ‘Reports’ section. At the very bottom of the reporting navigation menu, you’ll find an icon that says ‘Library.’ Click it.

2. Find and Publish the Search Console Collection

In the Library, you’ll see several cards under the ‘Collections’ heading. Look for one named ‘Search Console.’ By default, it will be marked as 'Unpublished'.

Click on the three vertical dots on the top-right of the Search Console card, and from the dropdown menu, select ‘Publish.’

Once you click publish, a new ‘Search Console’ section will appear instantly in your main reporting navigation on the left, ready for you to explore!

Introducing Your New Reports

Publishing the Search Console collection adds two specific reports to your GA4 interface:

• Queries: This comprehensive report lets you see the specific Google search queries that are bringing users to your site. You get to see them alongside key SEO metrics like clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position. Plus, GA4 adds its own data on users, engaged sessions, and engagement rate for each query.
• Google Organic Search Traffic: This is a landing page-focused report. It shows you which pages users arrive on from organic search and provides both Search Console metrics (clicks, impressions) and Analytics metrics (users, engagement rate, average engagement time, conversions) side-by-side for each landing page.

Practical Ways to Analyze Your New Combined Data

Simply having the reports is one thing, using them to find actionable insights is another. Here are a handful of real-world scenarios showing you how to leverage this new connection:

Scenario 1: Optimize Underperforming Keywords for More Clicks

Go to your Queries report. Sort the data by impressions (descending) to see which keywords your site shows up for most often in search results. Now, look at the click-through rate (CTR) for those high-impression keywords.

• Insight: If you find a query with a high number of impressions but a low CTR, it means people are seeing your page in the search results but aren’t compelled to click on it.
• Action: This is a golden opportunity. Go to that corresponding page on your website and work on improving the title tag and meta description. Make them more attractive, relevant, and compelling to entice a higher percentage of searchers to click your link instead of a competitor’s.

Scenario 2: Improve Content on High-Traffic, Low-Engagement Pages

Open the Google Organic Search Traffic report, which focuses on landing pages. Sort the table by users to find which pages are getting the most traffic from search.

• Insight: Find a landing page with lots of organic traffic but a low average engagement time or a low number of conversions. This signals a disconnect. People believe your page will answer their query, but once they arrive, they either don't find what they're looking for or become disengaged quickly.
• Action: Analyze that landing page carefully. Is the content too thin? Is it hard to read? Is the main call-to-action buried or unclear? Consider improving the content, adding videos or images to enhance engagement, making the layout more user-friendly, or ensuring a seamless user experience for both new and returning visitors navigating your site's content and design.

Scenario 3: Find and Double Down on "Money Keywords"

Return to the Queries report. This time, add an event count for your most important conversion, like 'purchase' or 'generate_lead.' You can customize the report to have a column for it.

• Insight: Sort by conversions to identify the exact search terms that are driving a significant portion of leads or sales. Many times these aren't the high-search volume keywords you thought were your most valuable! These are your true “money keywords” - the intentful terms people use when they're ready to take action.
• Action: Armed with this data, you can build a more robust SEO strategy by either creating additional in-depth content around those high-converting topics to further attract new leads or using your website's internal linking framework more strategically to channel more SEO authority into those money pages and make them even stronger in organic search presence.

Final Thoughts

By connecting Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4, you're layering your SEO data on top of your user behavior data. This integration gives you a truly holistic view of your user journey, from the initial search query to the crucial post-click engagement on your website, transforming both your data analysis and on-page optimization. Now, you can answer pivotal questions about which keywords will drive valuable clicks, rather than guessing or simply working with partial insights and incomplete data sets or disconnected tools.

As you connect GSC and GA4 with your ad platforms like Facebook or Google Ads, your CRM, and your e-commerce platform, you gather more data. However, the analysis of these reports can still become siloed when trying to analyze these disparate software packages on their own. Manually stitching this information into reports using spreadsheets is not only extremely time-consuming to conduct week to week and prone to human error, but the data and findings are not dynamic. Your report can become stale and outdated very quickly, and you may find yourself making decisions based on outdated information.

Here at Graphed, we help you automate this process. We connect directly to your data sources like GA4, GSC, advertising platforms, and your CRM, giving you one unified place for insights. Instead of learning a complex dashboard tool, you can simply ask questions in plain English - like "Which keywords from Search Console have the highest conversion rate in GA4?" - and instantly get live dashboards and answers.