Appreciation post: Finally saw the difference between Google Search Console and Semrush for my own sites

I spent a year just using Google Search Console to track my SEO progress for a small roofing blog I started for my company. It tells you what people search for and how you rank, but I was always guessing at why things dropped. Then I got a 14 day trial of Semrush back in February and ran my site through it. Found out my homepage had a bunch of broken internal links and my meta descriptions were way too short for decent click through rates. After I fixed those two things, my organic traffic went from about 80 visitors a month to nearly 220 by April. GSC is great for free data, but having the full picture through Semrush saved me a ton of guesswork. Anyone else find a tool that made a big difference once you tried it out?

3 comments

3 Comments

sagejackson13d ago

Oh man, my buddy ran his landscaping site on just GSC for months and couldn't figure out why his traffic flatlined. Turned out he had a TON of 404 pages nobody told him about.

tessalane12d ago

500 sneaky 404s will do that to a site, sounds like his traffic got ghosted by its own broken links. Guess the bots were too busy partying in the error zone to find the actual content.

ray_burns13d ago

@sagejackson have you checked if Google is actually crawling and indexing those 404 pages? Sometimes the bots get stuck in a loop on broken links and waste all their time there instead of your good content. Your buddy might need to check his server logs, not just Search Console, to see the full picture. A redirect map usually fixes that kind of mess if he sets up 301s for the most linked dead pages.