You will be able to use clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position to find opportunities.
Three months after her fixes, Priya opened the Performance report in Search Console and saw a line chart, four large numbers and a long table of searches. Clicks were up, but average position had slipped from 18.4 to 21.2, figures we will use as an example, and that looked like bad news. She nearly concluded that her changes had made things worse.
They had not, and the reason is in how these numbers are defined. The Performance report is the most useful report in Search Console for finding opportunities, as long as you read it correctly. This lesson explains its four measures and how to filter it to find pages worth improving.
An impression is counted when a link to your site appears in someone's search results. Google's documentation sets out the details, but the simple version is this: your page was shown to someone. The person may not have scrolled down to it or noticed it.
A click is counted when someone clicks a link in the results and goes to your site. Click-through rate, or CTR, is clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage.
Here is a worked example with figures that are only examples. Priya's P5 page had 2,400 impressions over three months and 36 clicks. Its CTR is 36 divided by 2,400, which is 1.5 per cent.
Search Console also shows these figures for each search query and each page, which is where they become 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 a single figure combines many different searches, places and devices.
Take an example with made-up figures. Suppose Priya's site appeared 40 times at position 3 for "P5 maths tuition Tampines" and 60 times at position 15 for "maths tuition east Singapore". Her average position across the two is (3 times 40 plus 15 times 60) divided by 100, which is 10.2. She is neither at position 10 for anything nor doing badly on her main search. The average describes neither search.
This explains Priya's worrying chart. After her fixes, her site began appearing for many more searches, often far down the results. Each new low-ranking appearance dragged the average further from the top, so the number rose, even though her positions for her main searches had improved. Total impressions and clicks had both risen. A worsening average position combined with rising impressions is often a sign of growth, so always read position alongside the other three numbers, and look at it per query.
The real value of the report is in the filters. You can set the date range, and compare two periods. You can filter by query, by page, by country and by device, and choose the search type, such as web or image.
Filter by page to see every search that one page appears for. Click the page in the Pages tab, then switch to the Queries tab. For Priya's P5 page, this showed "P5 maths tuition Tampines" as expected, but also "primary 5 maths tuition", "P5 maths tuition east" and a handful of searches about P5 problem sums. That told her which words parents were using and whether her page matched them.
Filter by query to see which of your pages appears 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.
Setting the country filter to Singapore is worth doing if your customers are local, so overseas searches do not blur the picture.
The most practical pattern to look for is a query or page with many impressions but few clicks. People are seeing your result and choosing another.
Two causes are common. The first is a weak title link or snippet: your result shows up but does not tell the searcher it is what they want. Lesson 3.1, Title links and snippets, covers the fix. The second is an intent mismatch: your page ranks for a search it does not really serve, so searchers skip it, and they are right to. In that case, either the page needs to match the intent better, or a different page should target that search, which takes you back to the keyword map.
Position matters too. A page at position 30 will have few clicks however good its title is, because few people look that far. So start with queries where you already sit reasonably high, perhaps on the first page or two, and where impressions are high and CTR is low, because a better title or a closer match to the intent often makes the most difference to them.
Open the Performance report, set the date range to the last three months and the country to your market, and look through the Queries tab sorted by impressions. The activity below asks you to list five queries with high impressions and few clicks, with the page that ranks for each.
Filter the Performance report for the last three months and list five queries with high impressions and few clicks, with the page that ranks for each.
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