Google's Property Set and How Can it Help You.

If you’re running a website, chances are you have a variety of different URLs that show up depending on where the visitor is viewing your site from.

For example, if you have a separate mobile site, you’ll likely have a “m.” at the start of your site - e.g. https://m.yoursite.com. Or, you might also display content both in a secure format https://www.yoursite.com and non-secure https://www.yoursite.com.

In the Google Search Console, combining these different addresses together and getting the stats on them used to be a clunky process. Now, however, Google has worked its magic and it’s so much easier to account for every visitor that comes in via a different portal.

You used to have to check and track these statistics separately, deep-diving into each element to figure out what was working and what wasn’t on each platform - and you had to add them up separately to get an overview of visitors and their behavior.

The Introduction of Property Sets

Cue the introduction of Property Sets.

These let you combine different addresses together and let Google know that they all direct visitors to the same site - your site. You can bring together apps, mobile sites, and desktop sites and monitor them together in a single glance.

Google’s Search Console puts together a single report that takes into account the clicks and impressions gained through each address, giving you an easy glimpse at your overall total. How’s that for making life easier?

How Does it Work?

The Property Sets treat each URL from your different addresses as a single presence instead of splitting them all up into separate entities.

Why This Benefits You

In this day and age, it’s likely you have visitors coming to your site from a variety of different places and platforms. Now, you can bring all of this information together in a single report to get an overview for how your website is performing everywhere.

Property sets also help you monitor your SEO performance and help spot any issues without having to individually inspect the reports for each URL you control. If you've recently switched over to HTTPS, for example, you'd want to make sure you see your HTTPS URL's increase in the index and your HTTP URL's fall off.

And even with the data aggregated, you can still break down the results into separate entities.

In this week’s free Weekly Marketing Tip on Lynda.com, I dive into more detail about Property Sets and how you can get them set up for your site. Watch that right here.

Brad Batesole is an entrepreneur, startup advisor, and marketing expert. He develops training for Lynda?.com and consults on Marketing & SEO with Branded Crate. Brad has spent more than twelve years working at the crossroads of business development, marketing, and social media. He was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine...

Learn more about Brad and view all his Lynda.com courses.