See the bigger picture through BigQuery – with Priya Verma

There’s one tool that Priya Verma finds particularly useful at combining data from various sources and conducting analysis – BigQuery.Priya says: “Gear up your SEO analysis through Google BigQuery.”Why BigQuery in particular?“SEO analysis in BigQuery is powerful because it lets you move beyond the existing tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, etc., and their limitations. It allows you to see the full picture at scale.By analysing millions of queries alongside other data, you uncover deeper patterns, user behaviour insights, and real opportunities to grow your traffic. We are focussing on BigQuery because of a subtle limitation of the most widely used tool for SEO, Search Console: you can only look at the top 1,000 keywords.For big businesses, that doesn't give a full picture. That's where tools like BigQuery come in. There are alternatives like Google Sheets plugins, where you can import 25,000 rows. However, if you are in an industry with thousands of keywords, that is still a huge limitation.That's where bulk export comes in. By connecting your Search Console to BigQuery, through the BigQuery API and the BigQuery Storage API, you can capture and store all your data at scale, without hitting those raw limits.This is where it really gets interesting, because the retention policy in Google Search Console is 16 months. After 16 months, the data is lost. In BigQuery, you can keep it for as long as you want.Then, when you take those insights and combine them with your analytics data – in GA4, for example – suddenly you're not just looking at what people are searching for, but how they behave when they land on your site. You can connect the dots between search demands, journeys, and conversions, and it makes the game more interesting.Not enough SEOs are aware of this. They just think of BigQuery as a database where you kind of store your data, which is true, but when you talk about the analysis of your historical data set, that's where it all changes.When you go to legal, they will ask you questions about retention and what you are storing. You need to spread that knowledge around to say that this is something that could be changed in BigQuery, and not just for SEO, but for things like analytics as well.”