It should be an essential tool for all website owners - everyone should care about page loading time from the CEO down to the junior web developer. Page speed is a factor that hugely affects visitor satisfaction, and Google takes it seriously by offering PageSpeed Insights. If you work in a larger organisation and focus on one particular part of website development and maintenance, such as a content writer, then this tool won't be as useful. It's intended for users with development or marketing-related responsibility
If you just want to understand how much traffic you're getting from Google organic search results, and study the queries and landing pages that make up this traffic, this is a great tool. If you also want to figure out where you may be missing opportunities or making it hard for people to find your site, this can help with that. However, GSC is not going to give you step by step instructions for how to fix SEO issues, and won't help prioritize anything either. It's essentially like a car dashboard, but doesn't do any driving or tell you how to drive.
I'd like more instructions about how to respond to certain errors I see - it can be difficult to understand when you see a red error message what it really means and how to fix it.
I'd appreciate warnings being 'ranked' somehow to understand what's really a big deal, and what might be a minor issue.
Search analytics is helpful but not comprehensive - you can only go back so far in the data, and can't see all the search terms that are sending traffic to your site.
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
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.
I've never used any software beyond PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse (the source of the PAgeSpeed Insights software.) I've used similar programs like Hummingbird for WordPress that pulls the same data using the same engine, but its really the only game in town as far as I'm concerned.
We are using Ahrefs and SEMRush along with the search console. Ahrefs helps in creating our backlink strategy while SEMRush for content gaps and opportunities. Search console is more preferred as it is completely free and data comes straight from Google. But you cannot see backlinks and ads in search console.
