Google Search Console is being used by our Marketing and Technology apartment to understand how customers find us organically on Google (search engine) and more importantly, what they don't find us by searching. For high ranking content, we can also find what articles are suggested by Google and how much traffic that brings us.
Pros
Search Engine Terms Visualization
Ability to sort based on times/pages
Cons
Difficult to understand HOW to make improvements
Lack of suggestion for rating terms you want to rank for but don't
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Search Console is helpful to understand what terms customers search for and click onto your website from. However, it's not helpful if you're looking for deep competitive insight on search terms people are using and how that impacts your website.
The Google Search Console dashboard provides easy access to crucial reports which identify organic search rankings for specific keywords and pages. It also helps to identify potential problems, such as slow pages, lack of responsive design and broken pages. This is the only truly reliable source of data for performance in Google's organic search - from search impressions to a breakdown of countries where search users come from. This allows a site owner to better optimize their site's content and structure to improve organic rankings, and increase click-thru rates.
Pros
Easy-to-read graphs and reports
Supports multiple sites/domains
Free to use
Easy to setup (especially in conjunction with Google Analytics)
Easily identify best performing pages on a site
Cons
Doesn't show ALL backlinks to each page - only a selection
Mobile usability errors are sometimes inaccurate - giving a false positive
Data is delayed by a few days
Likelihood to Recommend
This is an essential tool for every website owner/manager. It's crucial to understand your site's performance in Google's organic search, and there's no more reliable source than directly from Google itself. Unlike other competing tools which might use estimates, this data is 100% verified. At the very least, you can keep track of your organic rankings, and then take things to the next level and drill down to identify under-performing pages which could result in a significant boost to your traffic with small, simple changes.
There are few cases where this type of tool isn't useful - such as for managers of internal websites and intranets - anywhere where organic search is not a factor.
Google Search Console is considered an essential tool for all our web development clients, as it provides the most accurate information on how Google's search engine is analyzing their website. It's a good way to continually monitor performance, and we use it as one of the starting places to look for areas for performance improvement.
Pros
Provides ongoing monitoring of website performance.
Identifies potential issues that could impact a website's SEO.
Convenient dashboard format of information.
Cons
Not user-friendly for non-technical individuals or people with more basic SEO knowledge.
Doesn't always provide specific examples of errors identified.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Search console is an essential tool for web developers and SEOs, but it's less useful for individuals without technical knowledge or experience. In general, it's a helpful way for website owners to monitor potential issues on their site, but it's best used in collaboration with your web team so you can enlist help in evaluating errors and remediation.
We use Google Search Console to get a sense of search terms the market is using. This guides us in our website SEO, producing better copy for the landing page and even coming up with specific sub-pages for different industry customers. We also use Google Search Console's data when we originate keywords for our SEM campaigns.
Pros
Keyword insight
CTR
Cons
Data takes some time to come thru (at least 2-3 days delay iirc)
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Search Console is easy to use & set up. Insight is useful so as to sharpen SEO & SEM. Great for a small team where decisions to pivot can be made quickly. Useful as part of the larger Google toolset. E.g. we use Google Search Console together with Google Analytics, Google Ads etc. to guide our work
I mostly use it for my clients' SEO needs. There usually is not marketing or other relevant department, so I am responsible. Business problems it addresses are data/website monitoring.
Pros
The "new" SC's Overview is great for sharing with clients as it's a simplified presentation of different data with graphs.
Performance is my turf. It is designed for me at a glance to recognize the peaks and valleys of traffic. Clicks v. Impressions remains something central to SEO and other marketing efforts.
Cons
This is surely subjective, but as long as I could, I used the old SC but now that I am forced to just use the new, there still is a bit of a learning curve. Again, this is not a fair complaint as in time all will be forgotten, but I really do miss the old version.
One thing I do not like is the loss of the Manual URL Submission. I understand why it's been removed, but sometimes I am doing refreshes of pages and want that new version visited and reindexed ASAP rather than have to wait for Google to revisit.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is excellent for SMBs as well as large companies. I cannot envision any scenario where it would not be appropriate. Perhaps with Mom and Pop businesses, or individuals' websites, not all the available functionality might be useful, but it certainly can't hurt to have the headroom.
Google Search Console is first used to submit sitemaps when adding new pages, completely redoing websites, or after making a new site from scratch to notify Google to crawl it as soon as possible so we can start ranking on the Google SERPS. It's then used to track progress on SEO initiatives and find which pages and keywords are working best for us to get organic traffic and high CTRs when gaining impressions.
Pros
Sitemap submission
Easy performance insights
Clean UI/UX
Easy Setup with Integration with Google Analytics or DNS
Cons
Wish you could do keyword research or competitor research inside the tool
Fixing Crawl errors are at times not clear and have to Google what it means
Likelihood to Recommend
Every website on the internet should have a Google Search Console account and submit their sitemaps. It's absolutely free and takes only 5-10 minutes to submit your sitemaps and being able to track progress. Helps SEO and ranking higher on Google with really no effort at all and will quicken your results.
Our company uses Google Search Console to track our websites organic keyword rank. Along with analyzing any trends post-on page SEO tests.
Google Search Console is used by our Marketing department only, not our Sales team nor the Product Development team.
For us, Google Search Console addresses our organic keyword rank, any canonicalization errors, soft 404 errors, duplicate content, website crawling/indexing, and robots.txt file upload.
Pros
One of Google Search Console's strength is having a robots.txt file submission location. Rather than hoping Google finds the file, one can automatically submit for them to crawl, especially if changes are made often.
Another major benefit to Google Search Console is being able to submit a sitemap by simply adding the /sitemap.xml into the Sitemaps tab and having Google crawl the website.
Lastly, being able to see the organic keyword position is important to know if you need to create any content or add the keyword to the on-page SEO to move up the SERPs. Google Search Console shows position over time of keywords with their simple performance chart.
Cons
As of recently, Google Search Console has switched to a new design interface and in the new design interface, it's extremely difficult to add new users to a property, along with find the rich snippets and schema tabs. On the surface, it appears that Google Search Console removed some features from the old design.
Difficulty verifying domain... On multiple occasions, I have been revoked access to Google Search Console data and have had to re-verify the domain DNS. I follow the step-by-step process of verifying the domain and the results are very inconsistent. Sometimes Google Search Console recognizes the DNS update and the majority of the time it does not.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Search Console is well suited for any business that is looking for basic web traffic analytics (SERP, on-page SEO, etc.), mainly because it's free and integrates extremely well with Google Analytics.
Apart from that, if you are a larger company and use enterprise analytics and need more advanced tools then I would look elsewhere.
As a web development company, we design and build websites for clients. After launch, we manage and maintain search rankings and search engine optimization (SEO) if a client contracts us for ongoing work. Part of this ongoing work includes submitting the sitemap to Google's webmaster tools and monitoring performance through Google's search console.
Pros
The search console ensures a website's sitemap is working properly and identifies any inconsistencies or errors in the sitemap like 4XX errors or 5XX errors and gives you an opportunity to fix the issues.
Gives users a high-level look at their analytics without having to deep dive into Google analytics.
Shows analytics like impressions, click-throughs, etc. that Google analytics doesn't do as well.
Cons
Search queries are nice to see but could be more detailed as far as if a user typed that in and actually clicked through or if they just saw it in the results.
Would be nice if you could do more keyword research in this tool rather than having to use Google AdWords to find keyword research.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are interested in understanding how users interact with your website but don't want to get "into the weeds" with Google Analytics and in-depth information, this offers a great high-level approach to understanding your web content better.
VU
Verified User
Strategist in Marketing (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
It's mainly for the marketing team. It helps us monitor our site health, such as if we have broken links to fix, if our pages are mobile friendly or not, etc.
Pros
Good tracking on the broken links
Great insights on how you can fix the pages to make them mobile friendly
Cons
For some broken links, they have limited information of where it came from, so it's difficult to locate the real issue and fix.
Likelihood to Recommend
Overall it is very useful for almost every organization. And if I remember correctly it is free to the public. So why not have it?
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (Telecommunications company, 11-50 employees)
Google Search Console is used by several teams across the whole of the organization. These teams generally sit within Marketing departments. The tool is used primarily by those involved in SEO efforts, but it has also proven beneficial for detecting user experience issues that happen to impact SEO such as broken links on websites.
Pros
Google Search Console is a good resource for learning which keywords are driving organic traffic to our websites. We realize that much of that data is actually not made available by Google, but even the data we get is worthwhile.
GSC is also the primary method we use for submitting brand new or significantly revised pages to Google for indexing.
GSC also helps us identify issues on our websites which impact not just SEO but also other areas.
Cons
As mentioned, the keyword data available is far from complete. Like most people involved in SEO, I would love to see all the other data not shown.
It's unfortunate that users can only look back at the last 90 days of data at any point in time. Fortunately we are able to integrate GSC with other tools that store this data for future reference.
GSC does occasionally flag warnings that have been applied to our sites' presences in search results. Often, these warnings are unnecessary and GSC makes it possible to have them reviewed and removed, but it is annoying that unnecessary warnings are visible even for a short time.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anyone working in SEO should be looking at Google Search Console data, ideally connecting it to Google Analytics in order to enjoy the flow of data from one tool to another. But the tool was originally named Google Webmaster Tools and to be honest there are several tools available that any webmaster/front-end web developer would find useful for monitoring the health of their site.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)
