Google Search Console vs. Google Trends

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.

Incentivized

Google Trends is appropriate in so many scenarios, but I definitely suggest it for content ideas and inspiration. Many people utilize it after already writing their content to add in popular phrases or words, but that is not enough. The platform should be used prior and during the content creation process so that you can use the data to see what your audience/customers are interested in at the moment and create the content based on their interests. It can help, but I find it much less appropriate to use it after your article, eBook, etc. is already written. Maximize on this useful tool by ensuring the topic you're writing about is relevant in the first place before simply adding in popular keywords. An article that's written based on what's trending will be far more successful than an article that solely has popular phrases added to it.

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• 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.

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• Google Trends shows me geographic locations where a particular topic may be useful for advertising.
• Google Trends allows me to drill down into those locations to metro and city levels where I can focus on exactly what local business clients need to know.
• Google Trends allows me to identify and qualify search terms that my client's need to optimize their websites and social media content for.
• Google Trends shows me what people are talking about in a specific location over a specific period of time. This is a great way to know what I should be posting on social media.

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).

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• Top charts: would be nice to include top charts for the current month.
• Explainers: would be good to have some information buttons next to graphics and charts to show in depth what criteria go into making those charts.
• More images: would be interesting to see trending image searches.

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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.

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Google Trends is very easy to use. you just search for a certain keyword or phrase, and it tells you how often that keyword or phrase is searched, where in the world it is searched, and over the last decade, how often it is per year.

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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.

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I haven't needed to use any support for Google Trends. However, I've used Google's support in general and it's a hit or miss. Usually, there's a long wait or they don't understand my problem. They are the only ones that can help, so sometimes I feel stuck. They prioritize paying customers for sure.

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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.

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Overall I think that Ahrefs is a better product when it comes to really drilling down and getting all the data that you need in order to understand a given behavior or problem. Ahrefs is much more powerful in its feature set but does not have the same level of overall data/visual data representation that Google Trends does.

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.

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• Google Trends has shown me when a keyword is no longer working for my website so that I can adjust the content accordingly.
• It shows me seasonal differences so I can adjust my PPC budgets to be on pace with the trends.

Incentivized