Why Warehouse Google Search Console Data?

If you are like me, you have a Google Search Console (GSC) tab open all the time and you are evaluating your SEO efforts through the triangle of clicks, impressions, CTR and Position (I’ll let you do the math why it is a triangle)

My GSC usage has been rapidly shifting away from the limited interface that GSC offers to what we have built at Quattr. Below are a few key features where GSC limits us greatly and a more sophisticated solution becomes a must have for any serious SEO professional.

If you would rather jump to the next step to start warehousing your Google Search Console data, read our next article on how to warehouse Google Search Console data

1. Analyze Non-Brand Trends in Google Search Console

Yes you can filter for keywords not containing and some may even have wrestled with the new and hard to use regex capabilities. But in reality, most large websites have too many variations of non-brand terms that a more first class non-brand filters is required to feel confident and measure things accurately

2. Period over Period Analysis with Google Search Console

Yes there are period over period filters available in search console. But most often you must resort to the unwieldy custom date comparison and type four different dates while manually ensuring that the two date periods are equal in length. I often struggle to experiment with other date filters as getting them right is so hard.

3. Saving and Sharing Trends from Google Search Console

OK, having managed through the filters available and having spent several minutes getting the period over period comparison right I often wish there was a way to save the filters that I frequently apply ex. Compare last 8 complete weeks to previous 8 complete weeks with non-brand filters and country as USA.

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4. Combining GSC metrics across specific sub-domains, domains or sub-folders

Oftentimes a set of URLs have moved between sub-folders or sub-domains and the only good way to see the overall trend is by combining the metrics across two or more sub-domains or top level domains and often even two sub-folders I have verified separately in Google Search Console. No easy way to analyze them together without first exporting the data.

5. Track Unique Pages or Unique Keyword Trends in Google Search Console

Being able to measure long term trends or short term sudden drops in number of unique pages that generated the clicks in a given period or the number of unique keywords that we ranked for overall or on the first page can be done by downloading the data but not from the GSC user interface. These metrics are very valuable to track as leading indicators of optimization efforts besides monitoring for that dreadful ‘noindex’ markup your developer may have shipped last night (yes, go check for that now if you didn’t first thing you woke up).

6. Filter Google Search Console Metrics by Page Experience and Core Web Vitals Metrics

What percentage of traffic is receiving a good page experience, what is the growth differential between fast vs slow pages. You can see impressions trends without filters via the page experience report but that’s all very limited and you are an advance SEO professional like I am and won’t settle for the basics.

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7. Group Queries into Keyword Clusters and Chart Clicks or Ranking Trends

Your website ranks for thousands, millions or perhaps even billions of keywords like some of our customers do. But Google Search Console will only let you see trends for a single keyword or keywords containing the same string (can’t even include ‘buy%’ and ‘shop%’ easily). For any serious GSC users, tracking clusters of related keywords is a starting point for making any meaningful analysis around important search intents

8. Advanced Filtering in Google Search Console

Just realized what attribute is skewing the trend you want to highlight to your team and felt out of luck that GSC won’t let you combine multiple AND / OR conditions ex. contains ‘download’ and doesn’t contain ‘free’? I find myself limited by the lack of advanced filtering capabilities in GSC.

9. Group HREFLANG Variations of a URL in Google Search Console

For websites managing multiple locales for most landing pages including the home page itself, it is hard to track the overall traffic for even a single page and forget about measuring the cannibalization between the right vs wrong HREFLANG variations of the URLs at a folder or global level. If your website uses subdomains, then you probably gave up on GSC at a much earlier stage!

10. Combine GSC Metrics With Other Website and SEO Analytics Tools

OK, skipping through tens of other limitations that I am sure you too have encountered while rubbing your eyes in the morning and checking on SEO for the call with the CMO or maybe even the CEO. Here is the biggest one. You probably have so many other metrics to fully triangulate and explain what’s going on. SERP Ranking Metrics, Organic Market Share or Share of Voice, Total Visitors, Conversions, Paid Google Ads Clicks, Bounce Rate etc. etc. This is not a limitation per se of the GSC UI, but the grand daddy of all reasons my usage of GSC has shifted to our own Quattr platform.

Need one more?

11. Determine Market Size Using the Impression Data in Google Search Console

Google search console data provides a comprehensive range of keywords that a brands’s website(s) currently rank for. It provides data for keywords that generated even one impression in the last 16 months across any country, device or search type and even if it didn’t generate any clicks to the website. This keyword set can be used to define an initial total market for a brand to focus on capturing. That’s since the existing content has already proven that the brand has relevance for these terms.

Using the impressions data for all these searches, a set of keywords can be mapped out to search behavior in each country, language, device and search type. The keywords can be mapped to search intents using natural language processing techniques. Subsequently, the total market can be built ground up from the micro-segments of the market defined by statistically valid sampling of keywords within each micro-segment. Each micro-segment can be thought of as any unique combination of search intent, language, country, device and search type. Click through rate models can be applied to SERP position data for all the URLs that rank from a brand’s website to arrive at the current percentage of the market already owned by the brand’s website(s).

The above total market view can be supplemented with additional keyword lists. First, the above technique is used to identify the top overlapping competitors and URLs. Subsequently, keyword gaps are discovered through keyword research of competitor URLs. This can greatly help extend the total market size view into dimensions that brands may have aspirations in or have competitive keywords or content gaps based on competitor URLs.

All this can be a challenging task for most brands, but fortunately this is something that is available in Quattr out of the box with no setup work!

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Quattr: The Most Powerful Analytics Platform for Your Google Search Console Data and More

Quattr warehouses Google Search Console data into a Snowflake based high performance warehouse. It combines your multi-year GSC trends across all domains for your brands with rank tracking data, market share trends, Lighthouse performance metrics, Google Analytics metrics, Google Ads trends, Crawl logs and more.

Besides overcoming all of the limitations described above, Quattr puts your Google Search Console data on steroids by offering search intent models, content classification ontologies and automated keyword clustering, topic clustering and many many advanced capabilities.

We recently launched a test drive of Quattr where you can see Quattr’s numerous advantages for powerful SEO analytics and recommendations with your own website’s data. Request a SEO platform test drive today.

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