The new beta Google Search Console has just announced 16 months of data available through their API! Previously, 3 months of data were available, so this is a substantial increase.

Keylime Toolbox imports all available query data, so our existing customers will have the additional data imported automatically (if 16 months aren’t already being stored) and any new customers will start their accounts with the full 16 months (that historical data will be stored, and new data will be imported each day). (The import process began as soon as Google made the additional data available and should be complete for all accounts over the next few days.)

Why use Keylime Toolbox for your Google Search Console query data? Oh, so many reasons.

16 Months Is Just the Beginning

When you sign up for Keylime Toolbox (even for the 2 week trial), the system imports all available data from Google’s API (now 16 months!) and adds new data each day. With Google Search Console, you can see a rolling window of 16 months, but with Keylime Toolbox, the data continues to aggregate.

You Get ALL Available Queries, Not Just 999

With the Google Search Console interface, you can see (and download) 999 queries (and with filtering, can see up to 999 queries that match that filter). with Google’s API, Keylime Toolbox imports substantially more (depending on the site, potentially more than 1 million queries a month).

This number of queries means that the percentage of “not provided” Google organic traffic is reduced from 99% (for most sites) to generally less than 50% (and sometimes a lot more). The percentage of “not provided” query data recovered depends on the site, but in all cases, is substantially more than is provided in web analytics.

You Can Categorize All Queries for Insights At A Glance

With Keylime Toolbox, you can segment queries into topic areas for additional insights on audience needs and SEO performance. Google Search Console provides one-time filtering based on a keyword, but Keylime Toolbox enables you to configure reports with permanent segments based on regular expressions (which can be as simply as a single keyword or as complex as you need).

For example, with Google Search Console, I can filter query data to see only queries that contain the word “keylime”.

With Keylime Toolbox, I can set up a query segment with a regular expression like this:

key ?lime

That will include all queries that contain “keylime” or “key lime” and will be configured as part of the account.

You can organize all the queries that bring traffic to the site in the same way to better understand how audiences are finding the site and how the site performs in Google organic search by topic area. (Ranking, click through rates, and impressions may trend differently depending on the topic.)

Below is the configuration of the “kittens” segment (it includes all searches that include the word “cat” except for “cat stevens”:

The example below trends Google organic traffic from mobile devices for queries related to “kittens” and queries related to “puppies” for 2018:

Below are charts with related SEO data for those sets of queries (ranking, click through rate, impressions, and number of queries in each set):

And you can compare date ranges (16 months initially and then for longer periods as the data accumulates).

Below you can see traffic and ranking for May 2018 compared to May 2016 for the “kittens” segment of queries (which in this case contains over 250,000 queries):

You Can Combine Query Data With Keyword Research for In-Depth Gap Analysis and Market Opportunity Calculations

Since you have access to a large pool of query data, you can combine the data from Keylime Toolbox with keyword research for detailed gap analysis and can use the average click through rates for your site (custom calculations based on the actual query data) to determine market opportunity.

Google’s API makes available all query data that has sufficient web-wide volume. This means that any queries that don’t meet the bar for being available in Google’s API also aren’t available through its keyword research tools. You can use Google’s Ad Planner to build a list of queries and then compare that to your existing traffic.

For the details, check out our post on using Excel’s VLOOKUP functionality to combine these two data sets. You can use the Keylime Toolbox filter and download queries functionality to export a filtered set of data (or all the data).

In the example below, the Excel file combines keyword research from Google Ad Planner with Keylime Toolbox Google organic traffic data from both mobile and desktop devices.

The opportunity calculations use average click through rates for both mobile and desktop for that topic area (all queries related to kittens).

This type of detailed analysis is only possible with the full query set (and is made easier with Keylime Toolbox’s query filtering functionality). And of course, you can mine these Excel exports in lots of other ways: identifying queries with high ranking and low click through rate, for instance. Or if the site loses Google organic traffic, you can compare before and after periods to identify which queries lost traffic and why (did the query stop ranking at all? did the rankings decline? did the rankings stay steady but click through rate declined?).

You Get Customized Click Through Rates Calculated From Your Site’s Actual Data

A couple of years ago, we analyzed nearly 5 million queries to see if we could find trends in click through rates. What we found is that click through rates by ranking position vary greatly by the topic of the query, the overall industry, and the site itself. The best click through rates to use for benchmarking and opportunity analysis calculations are your own. Below you can see an example of that. Click through rates for branded queries are generally substantially higher and click through rates for queries of different topics vary due to differences in the search results display (some have substantial oneboxes, for instance), what other sites are listed, and all kinds of other factors.

With Keylime Toolbox reports you can see average click through rates by position for each topic area, average click through rates across a topic generally, individual click through rates for each query, and trended click through rates (of both overall averages and specific ranking positions).

Of course, all of this just scratches the surface of how useful it can be to analyze all of your site’s query data, especially as longer date ranges become available. For any questions about using this data in actionable ways, just email us at support@keylimetoolbox.com.