Read Search Console without fooling yourself

Google will tell you, in its own numbers, how your site turns up in its search results. Those numbers are easy to read wrong, and then you go and change something that was fine.

Start with what the four numbers mean, because Google's definitions are narrower than they sound. An impression means a link to your site appeared on a page of results. It counts even if nobody scrolled down to it, though inside a carousel it has to be scrolled into view. A click is a click through to your site. Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. And position is the highest spot your site held on that page, averaged across impressions.

That average fools people most. Show up at position two once and position three once, and the report says two and a half. Now picture a new site with twelve impressions a month. The average will swing every week on a handful of searches. Google's own guide says not to focus too much on absolute position, and calls impressions and clicks the measure of success. On a small site, read position as a rough hint, over months.

The useful reading is page by page. Filter the report to one page and read the queries that brought it impressions. Then open the sitemap, where every page has one job and the search intent you planned it for. Do the queries fit the job? If a class page keeps appearing for people who want to buy pottery, the visitors are arriving at the wrong page, and the fix is in the copy or the sitemap. A ranking trick won't touch it.

Here's that reading for a fictional pottery studio's beginner class page. Two queries match its job exactly. One belongs to a shop the studio doesn't run, so check the page isn't promising something it doesn't sell. One is a gap: people looking for a children's workshop. That's a question for the owner. You don't add a page because a query appeared. And the list is never complete, because Google leaves out queries that are too rare or too private to report.

When the numbers fall, follow Google's guide to traffic drops, which is frank about noise. Small moves in position happen all the time, and Google advises against radical changes to a page that's already doing well. First, look at the same weeks last year: the dip may come around every year. Then find the pages that lost the most clicks. If a few big queries fell, check whether people stopped searching for them everywhere, which has nothing to do with your site. A drop straight after a change points at you: a page hidden from search, a broken page, a moved address.

One pattern has a specific cause. If impressions hold steady and clicks fall, people still see the result and choose something else. Google suggests looking at the page's title and snippet, or at whether another site now has a richer listing. That's one change you can make and then judge fairly.

How often? Google says there's no need to sign in every day. It emails you when it finds a new issue, and suggests checking around once a month, or when you change the site's content. Google also publishes its own walkthrough of the report, if you want to see where each number sits. Make it a monthly read, one page at a time, and end it by writing down what you'll do. 'Nothing this month' is a valid entry, and it's often the right one.

Read queries against each page's job, treat small numbers as small, check last year first.