Necessary - But Not Great!
November 16, 2018
Necessary - But Not Great!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Search Console
I use Google Search Console to support public-facing websites within a single unit in our organization. Linked with Google Tag Manager, Analytics and Ads, it provides a powerful resource for us to: Identify Google indexing and crawling errors, track our organic search performance, identify and address optimization issues, submit sitemaps to Google, check security status of the site, demote links and maps that we no longer want promoted, among others.
- Demote sitelinks
- Submit sitemaps to Google
- Review structured data elements on the
- Listing external and internal links on the site
- Disavow bad links
- Fetching as Google
- Poor UI
- Significant data discrepancy between Analytics and Search Console
- Unclear messaging around when a sitemap was submitted and when it was processed
- Terrible support
- Massive learning curve
- Free to use, has low ROI
- Just the beginning of the funnel, mandatory to have a CRM to track how users came to the site
- Can provide useful ROI analytics, only in conjunction with other tools. Nothing in the tool itself is useful on its own.
Again, Google Search Console is mandatory if you're a search marketer or developer. It is a free tool and it links directly to Google, so it's hard to not recommend. Although, if you want more actionable (and often cleaner) data, then using one of the above tools is necessary. I particularly recommend Moz and Screaming Frog due to their low cost and great metrics.