Most people connect Search Console and Analytics once, feel like they've done the SEO homework, and never open either again but connecting them is the easy five minutes and what actually matters is what you check afterward.
In this post: Getting Both Connected . The One Report Worth Checking Weekly . Crawled But Not Indexed: The Flag Most People Miss . What to Actually Look at in Analytics . The Check That Costs Nothing . A Simple Weekly Routine
Getting Both Connected
Analytics connects with a GA4 Measurement ID pasted into Site Settings → Analytics, nothing else to configure. Search Console needs a little more care: choose the URL prefix property, not the domain property, since URL prefix is the one that supports HTML tag verification, the method a Djangify shop's built-in field actually uses. Paste the verification value into that field, save, verify, done. The full click-by-click steps are in the setup guide if you're doing this for the first time.
Every shop also gets an automatic XML sitemap at /sitemap.xml, no plugin, nothing to generate by hand. Once Search Console is verified, submit it once under Indexing → Sitemaps and it stays submitted, Google keeps checking the same file as new content gets published.
The One Report Worth Checking Weekly
Inside Search Console, the Performance report is the one to actually open regularly. The number that matters most isn't clicks on its own, it's clicks against impressions. A page with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks is showing up in search results and getting ignored, which is usually a title or meta description problem, not a ranking problem. The page is being seen. It's just not being chosen.
Average position matters too, but only in context. Sitting at position 8 for a search term with real volume is often worth more attention than sitting at position 1 for a term nobody's actually typing.
Crawled But Not Indexed: The Flag Most People Miss
Under the indexing side of Search Console, watch specifically for pages marked crawled but not indexed. Google visited the page and chose not to include it in search results. That almost always means the content is too thin, too similar to something else already published, or hasn't given Google a clear enough reason to rank it over what's already out there. It's not a queue the page is waiting in. It's a signal that page needs strengthening before it earns a spot.
The fix is rarely technical. It's usually going back into the piece and giving it the depth a generic version of the same topic doesn't have, and making sure it's actually linked to from somewhere else on the site rather than sitting orphaned.
What to Actually Look at in Analytics
In GA4, the landing pages report shows which pages people actually arrive on, and engagement time shows whether they stayed once they got there. A page pulling in traffic but losing people in seconds is worth more attention than a page with modest traffic that holds people properly, because the second one is doing its job even if the first number looks better on paper.
The number that ties all of this together is the same one worth tracking on social: not traffic for its own sake, but whether that traffic actually converts into an email signup. A page can rank well, get clicked, and hold attention, and still not be working if nobody who lands on it ever joins the list.
The Check That Costs Nothing
Alongside both of these, your Site Audit inside your Djangify admin area is worth a regular look. It's free to run, scores the shop across catalogue, pages, blog and SEO/trust, and flags exactly what's holding it back. Connect an AI to it for a deeper review when you want more than the rule-based scan.
A Simple Weekly Routine
Once a week: open Search Console's Performance report and note any page with high impressions and low clicks, that's a title or meta description to rewrite. Check the indexing report for anything newly marked crawled but not indexed, and add it to the list of pieces that need strengthening. In Analytics, glance at which landing pages people are leaving fastest. Once a month, run the Site Audit and clear whatever's flagged. None of it takes long once it's a routine instead of something you mean to get around to and I recommend your schedule time for it because you are running an independent digital business and getting visitors to you in always the end goal.
