I saw I had this blog post languishing on my desktop so I decided to post it.

There are hundreds of SEO tools out there that we can use, built by dozens of companies, but there is one tool that every SEO should use: Google Search Console (GSC). GSC is useful because it’s the only place where we can get search data directly from Google.

As many people know we can get this data directly from the web dashboard, but that comes with a lot of constraints, namely you can only export 1,000 rows at at time. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways around that these days, here are a few of them:

The mobile SERP is an interesting place. Despite mobile devices only being around for the last decade or so their impact on how we surf the web is immeasurable. Google has put in a lot of work on their mobile SERPs and for me, I find more changes happening on mobile than I do on desktop. In light of Pete Meyers fantastic article about measuring desktop rankings, I think it’s important to have similar conversation about the challenges on mobile devices as well since they take up 50% of all web traffic.

With Google constantly changing SERPs, it’s a good idea to keep a historical record of those changes. One way that we do that as SEOs is by using rank tracking tools like GetStat, Ahrefs, or SERPapi. All of these tools give use a snapshot of the data within SERPs, but none of them show a visual representation of SERPs that you can store for long periods of time. GetStat is close, but they only save a visual respresentation of SERPs for 2 weeks.