Tutorial: linking Google Search Console with BigQuery

As an online marketer or website owner, you know how important it is to get detailed insights into the search behavior of your target audience and the performance of your website in search results. Google Search Console provides a lot of valuable data for this, but did you know that Search Console doesn't show you all the data by a long shot?

In this blog, we'll show you step by step how to connect BigQuery to Google Search Console. So that you can access more data to take your SEO strategy to the next level.

The benefits of BigQuery with Google Search Console

Do you pair BigQuery with Google Search Console? Then you can store large amounts of search data from Google and analyze it. This is because with BigQuery:

• Bypassing the row limit of 1,000 within Google Search Console

• Store your data for longer than 16 months

• Can combine data from Google Search Console with other data sets, leading to a more complete picture of your SEO strategy.

Cost of BigQuery

There may be costs prohibited to BigQuery. After all, processing data and storing data is not free. But you have to try very hard before you get above Google's free credit.

You start with a $300 credit in your Google Cloud Console account. Each month, the first 10GB of storage is free. After this 10GB, you pay $0.02 cents per GB per month.

The first 1 TB of data processing is free each month. After that, you pay $5 dollars per TB of data processed.

Most websites will fall within Google's free limits. In fact, you have to have quite a few visitors to get above the free limits.

If you want to make sure you don't pay too much, you can set up a billing alert.

Linking Google Search Console with BigQuery 

Okay, enough chatter. Get to work!

1. Go to Google Cloud Console and log in with your Google Account.

2. Select the project you want to import Google Search Console data from.

Note: It is important that your payment details are verified in Google Cloud Console.

3. In the menu, navigate to 'IAM & Admin' > 'IAM'

4. Then click on 'Grant access'

5. Then perform the following steps

1. At new principals enter search-console-data-export@system.gserviceaccount.com and as role choose: BigQuery Job User

2. Then click 'Add another role' and choose: BigQuery Data editor

3. After that, click save. Now it looks like the image below.

6. Copy your project ID by clicking on the drop-down at the top of the menu.

7. Go to Google Search Console

8. From the menu on the left, navigate to 'Settings' > 'Export data in bulk'

9. Enter the copied project ID here

10. Then click 'continue' and 'set export'

11. Wait 48 hours for the first dates

12. Return to Google Cloud Console

13. Using the hamburger menu, navigate to BigQuery

14. Then in the explorer under your Project ID is the export from Google Search Console

15. To gain insight into the data, you can create an export to Google Sheets or LookerStudio. To do this, click on "Export" at the top of the menu bar.

Time to analyze!

That's it! From now on, there will be a daily export of your entire Search Console data. And now get to work analyzing this data!