The Performance report: your real keywords, measured
Search Console lists the exact queries on which your site appears, how many times, and how many people click. A guided reading of the one report that replaces guesswork. Tools series, part three.
Trends and autocomplete show what people search for in general. Search Console’s Performance report shows what they search for when they find you, specifically. It is the move from market research to bookkeeping: numbers, about your own site. It assumes a Search Console account, whose opening was the subject of a part of the series for non-specialists.
The four columns
The report’s documentation defines four measures, and everything else follows from them. The impression: your site appeared on a results page, whether the visitor saw it or not. The click: it appeared and someone clicked. The CTR: the proportion of clicks per impression. The position: the average rank at which the site appears for that query.
The query table, below the chart, is the part worth its weight in gold: every row is a sentence actually typed by someone Google connected with your site. Not a paid tool’s estimate, not a hunch: the record.
Three readings that pay
Many impressions, few clicks. The page appears but doesn’t tempt anyone: it is almost always a title or description problem, the two lines the visitor reads before choosing, covered in “Writing to be found”. Rewriting those two lines so they answer the query is the correction with the best effort-to-effect ratio in all of SEO.
Position 5 to 15. The page is at the gates of the leading pack: Google judges it relevant, just not relevant enough yet. This is the list of pages where a targeted effort, completing the answer, adding internal links from your strong pages, pays off fastest. A page at position 60 calls for different treatment: the topic or the competition may be out of reach.
The surprise queries. There are always, in the table, queries you had never thought of and on which you appear without meaning to. Each one is a signal: people search for that, Google thinks of you, and none of your pages really answers. Write the page, it starts with a head start.
The reading trap
One clarification that prevents false conclusions: the displayed position is an average, and a page that has just appeared on a query often enters the ranking from the bottom. Seeing your “average position” drop while impressions climb is therefore not a punishment: it is often the sign that the site is starting to appear on new queries, far down the ranking, which pulls the average down while real visibility widens. Judge on clicks, not on the average alone.
Next part: speed, measured the way Google measures it, with PageSpeed Insights.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.