4 Valuable data points in Google Search Console

Impressions

Impressions are the total amount of people that see your website on an organic search in Google.

Clicks

Clicks are pretty self-explanatory, but to maintain our cohesion of content, they are the total amount of actual clicks that your website receives from the impressions of an organic search in Google.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

Click-Through Rate (aka CTR) is the percentage of people that click on your website in a search vs the impressions you received. It’s a ratio, but we don’t claim to be math wizards here.

Average Position

Average Position is the mean (think mathematical definition, not describing a middle school bully) of your website’s position in the Google Search Results that lead to impressions and clicks in the first place.

Actions to Take in Google Search Console

Check Coverage

The Coverage section of Google Search Console shows you if there are any issues with crawling particular URLs of your website. Perhaps a link is broken or no longer indexing. This is where you can confirm that your whole site is being crawled and added to Google’s Search Engine.

If there are issues present, it’s a good place to get information for what needs to be addressed with your website, as having pages that aren’t being properly indexed can be costly to the progress of your overall web presence and business as a whole.

Compare Performance Over Time

Unlike the information we shared in our post regarding Google Analytics, time will be an essential factor to clearly indicate performance progress.

In Google Search Console there is a specific link for Performance, and from there you can choose to look at current performance or compare performance over periods of time, i.e.: current 7 days vs previous 7 days, past 3 months vs previous 3 months, etc.

Looking at the key metrics comparatively over time will allow you to draw conclusions about what is working and what is not. For example, you may see many impressions for a particular keyword, but few clicks. That can be done to keyword positioning, or perhaps the meta description of the page should be adjusted to entice people to click on the link in the first place.

Other important information to look at is the growth of branded keywords as a means of obtaining organic traffic. Growth with branded keywords shows that people are getting to know your brand more and directly seeking it out online. That is a great thing for any company to build upon in conjunction with keywords and particularly long-tail keywords that we’ve discussed in a previous post.

At the end of the day, the accumulation of all insights from various sources will help give a clear picture of what is going on with your marketing efforts and where to dedicate energy in the future.