A Necessity for Site Owners and Digital Firms
July 17, 2019
A Necessity for Site Owners and Digital Firms
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Search Console
As a marketing and web development firm, we utilize Google Search Console to improve and monitor our clients SEO performance. Google Search Console gives search analytics that are vital in tracking and reporting Organic search growth. It also shows which pages could perform better with some SEO changes, especially with metadata. Finally, the Search Console has some other tools, such as Change of Address, URL Inspection, and Robots.txt tester, that are very important to the web development and Search Engine Optimization process.
- Reporting on Search Performance: monitor, track and research your organic performance over time or compare time frames.
- Meta Data Testing and monitoring: make sure your product, events, AMP, and other meta tags are properly configured.
- Monitoring Security and Manual Actions: ensure that Google is not reducing your ranking for security issues or SEO errors.
- Producing suggestions for SEO improvements: Search Console provides links to resources to help improve the way Google crawls, indexes, and shows your website in search results.
- Reporting is strong, but could benefit from some additional functionality, such as sorting by % changed.
- Some functionality is lost in the "New" Search Console, forcing you to revert to the old version to get things done.
- Because the "Old" version doesn't have the same functions as the "New" one, you're forced to switch back and forth between both platforms to get many things accomplished.
- Many of the "Warnings" and Suggestions aren't very clear on how to fix the issue, or are vague in their explanation of what is wrong.
- As aforestated, Search Console is a necessity for SEO and digital marketing firms. Its ease of use may be a slight "negative" as it takes some of the mysticism away from SEO firms.
- This tool helps prioritize which problems to fix, and gives suggestions on how to fix them.
Google Search Console offers more information than Google Analytics alone (though they can be integrated together). Google Search Console is also a free tool, so that can be an attractive facet when compared to Moz or other SEO programs (though the information provided is substantially reduced.) Google is responsible for 90-ish % of search traffic, so it is more important than Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing Webmaster Tools shouldn't be forgotten, though. It has some great things that Google Search Console lacks.