Item: Google Search Console
Rating: 9
Author: Stewart Donaldson

Overall Satisfaction with Google Search Console

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Google Search Console to monitor organic search performance and assess month-over-month and year-over-year growth. We also use it as our technical SEO health tool, alongside Ahrefs, to monitor the current state of our technical SEO and identify any pressing issues we need to address. Finally, we use search queries and page-level data to identify which terms are driving traffic and any gaps or opportunities we can capitalise on.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Understanding your SEO performance and really drilling down into what keywords and pages are driving that performance.
Understanding the internal linking and technical stability of your website.
Understanding how your mobile site is performing and what needs to be fixed to give visitors the best user experience when accessing your website via a mobile device.

Cons

Being able to easily split out brand and non-brand searches. This is a very manual process.
Providing all search data in GSC rather than having to access this via the API.

Return on Investment

Helped us understand why performance has dropped, so we can rectify the issue early and minimise the impact on lead generation.

Usability

Overall, it is good, but I've always found it clunky to compare trends and do year-on-year and month-on-month analysis.

Alternatives Considered

Ahrefs and Semrush

I think these tools are a lot better than GSC, to be honest, because they bring everything together in one place and offer better keyword analysis capabilities. However, I would select GSC over these tools because it is Google's proprietary data, and ultimately, I am optimizing my SEO for Google, so it's better to go to the source of truth than a third-party dataset.

Key Insights

Do you think Google Search Console delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Google Search Console's feature set?

Yes

Did Google Search Console live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Google Search Console go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google Search Console again?

Other Software Used

Ahrefs, Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Likelihood to Recommend

I have been using GSC for over 10 years now, and it has been a reliable source of truth for how your website's SEO is performing. Some scenarios where GSC is well suited: - Understanding what search queries are driving traffic - Drilling down to specific pages that are performing well in search and what keywords are driving that traffic - Understanding early if there are any technical issues with your website that need addressing - Flagging early if pages are not being indexed and why Scenarios where it is less appropriate: - Tracking the rankings of keywords for a specific keyword set - Doing deeper analysis into keyword trends or brand vs non brand.

Google Search Console Feature Ratings

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Great as a source of truth on how you are performing within Google SERPs.