SEO Stack vs Google Search Console: A Comparison

Google search console itself is useful and obviously it being free is a more attractive prospect than paying for a tool that gives you GSC data - but, the limitations with GSC quickly become apparent when you are a regular user of it.

Here are some of my personal bug-bears with search console.

This is a big one and it’s the reason SEO Stack exists in the first place - primarily because we got fed up of using AHREFS and other tools to look back at historic “traffic projections” rather than having the actual data to hand.

By default, GSC holds 16 months of performance data on a rolling basis, every single day, the oldest day rolls off and is deleted. Unless you export to Google BigQuery, that data is gone and non-retrievable.

16 months sounds reasonable until it comes to you trying to do anything with it, a proper year on year comparison needs 24 months minimum. Trying to work out whether a site recovered from a core update two years ago, or whether a seasonal dip is normal for that site, or whether a category has been in slow decline for three years rather than one - none of that is possible inside GSC.

I see this constantly with new clients at Assertive, a client lost 40% of their traffic over 2 years and they want to know why, and the honest answer is that the data which would tell us has already been deleted by Google. So we’re piecing it together from Ahrefs estimates and whatever screenshots someone happened to save - which is grossly inefficient and isn’t how we like to do business, especially when it comes to SEO audits.

SEO Stack warehouses your GSC data from the moment you connect a property, and, it does it with NO setup required, it is plug and play making it suitable even for amateurs or newbie SEOs. Depending on your plan that’s 60 months up to 120+ months+, we store every query, every page, every country, every device, every day - stored and queryable in the same interface you’d use for last week’s data. We made it our prerogative to ensure clients could warehouse/store and access their data whilst retaining the same common interface - unlike Google’s BigQuery solution, which, requires you to understand how to use BigQuery and how to use Python/SQL to access your data - just a headache and overkill for a lot of site owners/SEOs.

We give users the ability to warehouse, store + access ALL of their data quickly and easily - no setup required, simply create an account, import a website and SEO stack will take it from there. We automatically provide warehousing - we backfill the last 16 months and then add to that data every single day.

This is where I lose my patience with search console the most.

You can filter queries in GSC, You can filter pages, But you get 1 filter per dimension which means you cannot say “queries containing ‘board’ but NOT containing ‘jupiter’” because that’s two query filters and GSC won’t let you stack them. So what do you do? You export 1,000 rows and filter in a spreadsheet, which defeats the object of having a reporting interface.

In SEO Stack you can layer up to 1,000 filters with MUST and SHOULD logic. Contains, doesn’t contain, starts with, ends with, exact match, regex, bulk lists of terms, case sensitive or not. That “containing board, not containing jupiter” example above is literally two clicks in SEO Stack and it applies to the chart, the KPI cards and every table at once - with the KPI cards showing you what share of the total each filtered view represents.

Then you can SAVE it. GSC has no concept of a saved filter. Every time you open a property you rebuild your brand vs non brand view from scratch. SEO Stack gives you a preset filter library with groups and folders, so your branded, non branded, product, blog and question query segments are one click away on every property, and the AI Assistant can generate filters for you as well.

For agencies this is huge. The segmentation work gets done once per client, not once per report.

GSC lets you compare two date ranges, which is useful albeit quite limited, but both ranges have to sit inside the 16 month timeframe window. So you can compare this quarter to last quarter, you cannot compare this quarter to the same quarter 3 years ago at full query depth, because that data is outside the scope of what GSC offers.

However, SEO Stack’s Search Console Comparison tab lets you compare any two periods in your warehouse. Last 6 months vs previous 6 months, this March vs March 2023, whatever you need - with core updates overlaid on both periods so you can see what Google was doing at the time rather than making assumptions.

For example - if you had 36 months of data warehoused in SEO Stack, you could compare last 3 months YoY for 3 years.

Google search console offers extremely basic annotations - you can add a comment against a date and that’s it, you cannot mark the day you migrated the site, changed the nav, rewrote the category pages or noindexed 3,000 thin URLs, so 6 months later when someone asks why traffic changed in March, you’re digging through Slack and Jira trying to remember.

We decided to make annotations what they should be and that’s AI driven and detailed - log annotations against URLs + URL groups, specify authors, dates, changes made and more - and let AI track your work.

SEO Stack has a full annotation system, every annotation is categorised (canonical changes, content consolidation, content cull, indexability changes, navigation changes, rendering fixes, link building, digital PR and so on), can be attached to specific URLs, authored, imported and exported, and shows as a marker on every chart. Google core updates, spam updates and other confirmed algorithm changes are overlaid automatically and you can filter which algo types to show.

Annotation marker, algo update marker, click line. All on one chart. That’s how you actually answer “what happened in March”.

Two columns GSC doesn’t have and should, but it’s okay, for every feature they leave out is an advantage for us.

Click share helps you to understand what percentage of the site’s total clicks each query or page is responsible for, that’s how you spot dependency - the 3 pages driving 60% of your organic traffic that nobody’s made changes to in 2 years.

Last click date tells you the last day a query or page earned a click. Sort by it ascending and you have your dead content list. Pages with impressions and no clicks for 8 months are not pages worth keeping in their current form.

GSC will show you a chart going up or down. It will not tell you WHICH queries grew and which decayed, because that requires comparing two periods across the full query set and GSC can only do 1,000 rows.

SEO Stack has dedicated Winners and Losers reports - queries growing, queries decaying, pages growing, pages decaying - each with clicks this period vs last, a sparkline per row, and month by month click columns so you can see the shape of the change rather than just the delta. There’s also a URL matrix showing every URL’s clicks by month over 3, 6 or 12 months, colour coded for gains and losses.

This is the report I open before every client call. It answers the first question I’m going to be asked before I’ve been asked it.

GSC is free. SEO Stack isn’t. That matters for a lot of people and I’m not going to argue otherwise.

GSC is also the source of truth. SEO Stack pulls from it, warehouses it and extends it - it doesn’t replace the connection. You still need a verified GSC property, you still go to GSC for manual actions, security issues, sitemap submission, removals, the Core Web Vitals report at property level and the structured data enhancement reports. Those aren’t things we’re trying to rebuild.

And if your site has 200 pages and ranks for 900 queries, the 1,000 row cap genuinely doesn’t affect you and 16 months might be enough.

But if you’re an agency managing 30+ properties, an in house team that has to prove SEO’s contribution to the business, an eCommerce site with tens of thousands of URLs, or a publisher trying to work out where 3 years of clicks went - GSC on its own isn’t giving you the data to do your job. It’s giving you a sample of it and deleting the rest.