Use clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position to find pages and queries to work on.
Open Google Search Console and click Performance. You'll see a line chart, four large numbers and a long table of searches. The Performance report is the most useful report in Search Console for finding opportunities, as long as you read it correctly.
Priya runs a maths tuition business with a page for P5 (primary 5) maths tuition. Her customers are parents in Tampines and the east of Singapore. Three months after making the fixes from earlier lessons, she opened the report. Clicks were up, but her average position had slipped from 18.4 to 21.2 (example figures). She nearly concluded her changes had made things worse. They had not, as the definitions below show.
An impression is counted when a link to your site appears in someone's search results. Google's documentation sets out the detailed definition. The simple version is that the page was shown to someone. An impression doesn't mean the person scrolled down to the result or noticed it.
A click is counted when someone clicks a link in the results and goes to your site. Click-through rate (CTR) is clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage. Over three months, Priya's P5 page had 2,400 impressions and 36 clicks. Its CTR was 36 divided by 2,400, which is 1.5 per cent.
Search Console shows all three for each search query and each page. That breakdown is what makes them useful.
Average position is the average of your site's highest position in results across the searches where it appeared. Google calculates it from every impression, so one figure combines many different searches, places and devices. The result can describe none of the actual searches it summarises.
Here is Priya's page again. It appeared 40 times at position 3 for "P5 maths tuition Tampines" and 60 times at position 15 for "maths tuition east Singapore", which is 100 appearances in total. The average is (3 times 40 plus 15 times 60) divided by 100, or (120 + 900) / 100 = 10.2. Priya isn't at position 10 for anything, and she isn't doing badly on her main search.
The same arithmetic explains her slip from 18.4 to 21.2. Her site had started appearing for many more searches, often far down the results. Each new low-ranking appearance pulled the average away from the top, so the number went up and looked worse. Meanwhile her positions for her main searches had improved, and her total impressions and clicks had both risen. When average position gets worse while impressions are rising, that is often a sign of growth.
Always read impressions, clicks, CTR and average position together, and never judge by position alone. Check position for each query instead of relying on the site-wide average.
Most of the report's value is in its filters. The controls let you:
set the date range compare two periods filter by query, page, country and device choose the search type, such as web or image
To see the searches one page appears for, click the page in the Pages tab, then switch to the Queries tab. The list is not complete, because Google leaves out some queries, called anonymized queries, to protect user privacy. When Priya did this for her P5 page, she found "P5 maths tuition Tampines", which she expected. She also found "primary 5 maths tuition", "P5 maths tuition east" and a handful of searches about P5 problem sums. This showed her which words parents used and whether her page matched them.
Filtering by query works the other way round and shows which of your pages appear for a search. If two of your pages appear for the same main search, you may have the competition problem from lesson 2.5, Build your keyword map.
If your customers are local, set the country filter to Singapore so overseas searches don't blur the picture.
The most useful pattern to look for is a query or page with many impressions but few clicks. It means people see your result and pick a different one. There are two common causes.
The first is a weak title link or snippet. Your result appears, but it doesn't tell the searcher that your page is what they want. Lesson 3.1, Title links and snippets, covers how to fix this.
The second is intent mismatch. This is when a page ranks for a search it doesn't really serve, so searchers skip it, and they are right to. You have two options. You can change the page so it matches the intent better, or you can have a different page target that search. The second option takes you back to your keyword map from lesson 2.5.
Position affects how much either fix can help. A page at position 30 gets few clicks however good its title is, because few people look that far down. Put first the queries where you already rank reasonably high, perhaps on the first page or two, and that have high impressions and low CTR. That is usually where a better title or a closer match to intent makes the most difference.
Open the Performance report, set the date range to the last three months and the country to your market, then go to the Queries tab and sort by impressions. Look for queries with high impressions and few clicks, and note which ones already rank on the first page or two. For each one, decide whether the likely cause is a weak title link or snippet, or intent mismatch. The activity below asks you to list five queries with high impressions and few clicks, with the page that ranks for each.
Set the Performance report to the last three months. List five queries with high impressions and few clicks, and the page that ranks for each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).