Google Search Console is helpful to understand what terms customers search for and click onto your website from. However, it's not helpful if you're looking for deep competitive insight on search terms people are using and how that impacts your website.
Rankinity is well-suited for agencies that provide SEO services for some clients. It's a great stepping stone tool while an agency scales it's services and builds a book of SEO clients since you pay per keyword check. The frequency of checks can be set for each client (project) so if services are performed monthly, you can set checks to happen at the beginning of the month
More training resources would be an asset. A beginner is given the power to completely destroy a sites search results at the push of a button. Likewise it is a powerful tool to enhance search results also.
An option to take care of multiple versions of the same site simultaneously would be helpful. An option to use the same validation script across all versions and administer them simultaneously would be a time save (i.e. non-www, www, http://, and https:// versions of the same site).
Google Search Console is a simple program that allows organizations to get a solid understanding of the way their site functions and how users land on it. It can be used for making critical business decisions regarding marketing budgets and that within itself is why it deserves a 10.
We've seen one major platform update (user interface overhaul). This has made the system much easier to use. There are some features that could still be improved like historical rankings but overall the system is good and aligns with the expectation for what you pay for it. Not a whole lot to complain about on the usability side of things
As with all Google software, your primary source of help is their forums, their knowledge base articles, or whatever tutorials you can find on the web. Often answers on their forums are not straightforward and may not address the actual issue you're experiencing. The KB articles are typically written like instruction manuals - for better or for worse. Tutorials on the web may vary, but the odds are good someone out there had the same questions as you and was kind enough to document their experience.
No chat support, only email support. Whenever I've used their support system, I have received responses in 1-2 business days and the solution addressed my needs/concerns. I've really only had a couple of instances where I've needed to reach out to their support team since the system is pretty straight forward and easy to use.
SEMRush is a supplementary tool we use to provide competitive analysis. While it does, or should, provide the same data that Search Console does, but I only fully trust Search Console when it comes to basic performance in Google for the sites we develop and own. SEMRush, and other products like it, does provide much more in-depth insights that can help drive business decisions, including site performance on other search engines, along putting organic and paid search performance in one spot. However, SEMRush costs money while Search Console is free.
Rankinity is simpler solution that's different than the all-in-one type solutions we've also used. A lot of it comes down to process and how service offerings are built for clients. We use Rankinity for clients where we're tracking a lot of keywords in a lot of different geographic areas because it's a more cost-effective solutions. But for larger clients, we typically rely on all-in-one solutions that offer more tools for SEO.
Given that this is a free tool, the return on investment has been particularly high - we've identified and addressed a few site issues that could have meant a reduction in search traffic.
Our organic search traffic has been on the rise in part due to the insights gained from the search traffic analytics provided within the console.
