If you’ve been an SEO for even a short time, you’re likely familiar with Google Search Console[1] (GSC). It’s a valuable tool for getting information about your website and its performance in organic search. That said, it does have its limitations.
In this article, you’ll learn how to get better-connected data out of Google Search Console as well as increase the size of your exports by 400%.
Google Search Console limitations
While GSC has a number of sections, we’ll be focusing on the “Performance” report. From the GSC dashboard, there are two ways you can access this report:
Once inside the “Performance” report, data for queries and pages can be accessed:
This reveals one of the issues with GSC: Query and page data is separated.
In other words, if I want to see the queries a specific page is ranking for, I have to first click “Pages,” select the page, and then click “back” to “Queries.” It’s a very cumbersome experience.
The other (two-part) issue is with exporting:
- Performance data for queries and pages must be exported separately.
- Exports are limited to 1,000 rows.
We’ll look to solve these issues by utilizing the GSC API.
What is the Google Search Console API?
Now we know the GSC user interface does have limitations: Connecting query data with page data is tricky, and exports are limited.
If the GSC UI represents the factory default, the GSC API represents our custom settings. It takes a bit more effort, but gives us more control and opens up more possibilities (at least in the realm of query and page data).
The GSC API is a way for us to connect to the data within our account, make more customized requests, and get more customized output. We can even bypass