Google Search Console vs. Topic

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.

Incentivized

Great at providing content briefs as well as for seeing the types of topics that rank well competitively. It's also good with finding content that needs to be refreshed which is a super easy way to drive near term SEO results.

• Provides details on what other sites contain backlinks to your site, along with the page they direct to within your site
• Displays impressions and click throughs for Google search queries
• Individual page performance by location and device category as it pertains to generating clicks leading to your site
• Basic indexing and readability issues within your site
• The new interface that just rolled out is much easier on the eyes

Incentivized

• Content Brief
• Competitive SERP ranking analysis
• Grouping content topics together to see related keywords/ content clusters easily
• Analyzing Google Search Console data for content refresh opportunities

• 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.

Incentivized

• Using the GSC data to find new, adjacent content opportunities.
• They are using GPT-3 for title generation and would love to see it used to provide more content suggestions beyond the titles/descriptions
• Sometimes it doesn't surface 'questions' that people are asking related to lower volume terms but not sure of a way to solve that

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Topic was way less costly than MarketMuse with similar functionality. It was agnostic to CMS (WordLift is designed for Wordpress only). So it was priced well with all the functionality we needed.

• I have used Search Console for every web project I have worked on. The results have always been outstanding.
• Surprising insights can be gained from the keyword analysis. I have discovered multiple profitable channels that weren't even on the radar.
• AMP has been a game changer over the last few years and this tool makes it extremely simple to ensure your pages are mobile friendly.

Incentivized

• It has greatly reduced the number of hours our SEO team has to review content
• Has sped up our content briefs by hours per brief
• Great for helping us to see what content is performing well / needs help via the Google Search Console integration