Google Search Console vs. Siteimprove

There are lots of tools and platforms that help us rank well on search engines. While that is helpful, we do need to know how those efforts paid off. This is where Google Search Console comes in. It is vital for every business or website trying to rank well on search engines to have Google Search Console so that they can track their performance and make necessary adjustments.

Incentivized

Siteimprove works well for managing the health and performance of your customer-facing sites in terms of performance, digital experience, and accessibility. It also helps to define policies to proactively avoid experience breaks or issues for customers before they occur. It can improve by providing more options to configure policies for large sites with thousands of pages.

Incentivized

• You can also submit your sitemap directly to Google and get it crawled.
• You can also index and crawl you updated and new webpages.
• It also displays errors that are preventing your site pages to get indexed in Google.
• You get a list of all the keywords for which your site is ranking.
• You can track its position, CTR and impressions.

Incentivized

• User-friendly customisable dashboards, easy to make a dashboard from a template, or create your own, and add in whichever 'widgets' are relevant for what you are looking at
• Flagging words to review, allowing users to check and confirm if the word is 'accepted' or is a misspelling

Incentivized

• It can be a little difficult to navigate
• 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).

Incentivized

• I don't like that there are different navigation paths to go from point A to point B. When I want to navigate to a specific place, I have more than one way to get there, which means I have to make a decision about how I want to there and I'd rather the designer make that design based on what would be most efficient for me.

It's easy to use, but some features are lacking a clear explanation. Somethings don't always match up. For example, the Core Web Vitals often doesn't match what you would see in the Chrome Lighthouse report or the Google Page Speed Insights tool. The tool itself is a little too basic and has to be used alongside other SEO tools and other Google properties such as Analytics

Incentivized

Tool has undergone numerous changes, both to function and UX/CX. Makes it less than user friendly at times. But on the other hand, that does indicate a willingness to improve the product in a continual manner - which they've done nearly year after year - but it's always a case of who moved my cheese with each new iteration.

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.

Incentivized

I've used support often and it has been responsive, thorough and considerate of our needs. I can get a tech right away, they understand the issue, and work with us to resolve it. Often the problem is with the site we are trying to scan, sometimes it is with their product. I appreciate that they go beyond support into continually helping us implement SiteImprove in more places with 3rd party integration.

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.

Incentivized

We have used or tested other tools that get installed on a computer or that are hosted online, but none of them offer the features that come with Siteimprove. TotalValidator Pro will check your site for accessibility issues, but it is a manual check and there is no historical reporting. I can;t remember the names of the other online solutions, but even if they offered similar features as Siteimprove, they were all very expensive .

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Siteimprove has helped bring our accessibility scores up from middling to near-perfect.
• Siteimprove has helped reduce our broken links, style violations and misspellings.
• Siteimprove's heatmaps have helped us make the case for enforcing best practices on the website among key stakeholders.

Incentivized