How to Read Your Own Search Console Without an Agency

Everybody selling you SEO shows you a chart. Very few of them show you the chart in your own account, and fewer still explain it well enough that you could argue with them about it.

Search Console is Google's own tool, it is free, and the data in it is yours rather than an agency's summary of it. If you learn four numbers you can check anyone's work, including ours.

The four numbers

Open the Performance report and you get clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position.

An impression means your page appeared in a set of results somebody looked at. It does not mean they noticed it. A click means they chose you and arrived on your site. CTR is clicks divided by impressions, the share of people who picked you when they saw you. Position is where you sat on average, where one is the top.

Only clicks are real people on your site. Impressions are the size of the room. Position tells you where you were standing in it.

Reading them together is the whole skill

Any one number on its own will mislead you. In pairs they diagnose things.

Impressions up, clicks flat. Google is showing you more often and people are not choosing you. Usually the page is appearing for searches it does not really answer, or your title and description are duller than the ones around them. More visibility, no more work.

Impressions flat, clicks down. Something above you got more attractive, or a new feature is taking the clicks before anyone reaches the list. Nothing about your site changed; the page around it did.

Impressions up, clicks up, position roughly the same. This is what growth looks like early on. You are ranking for more things rather than ranking higher for the same things, and it is the pattern most local SEO produces first.

Position improving, clicks unchanged. Moving from thirtieth to eighteenth feels like progress and pays nothing, because almost nobody goes to the second page. Position only starts converting into clicks in the top handful of results.

The comparison that actually answers the question

The default view is the last three months, and on its own it tells you very little. The setting worth using is the date-range comparison: last six months against the previous six.

Six against six absorbs the noise. Trades are seasonal, roofing spikes after a storm and landscaping books in spring, so a three-month view of a landscaper in February says something very different from the same view in May. A six-month window either side smooths that out and lets you see whether the business is genuinely being found more, or whether the season simply turned.

That is the comparison behind every figure on our case study page — six months against the six before, in the client's own account, screenshots included. Now you can check it rather than believe it.

What to ignore

Average position across the whole site is close to meaningless. It mixes a page ranking second for your business name with a page ranking fortieth for something you barely sell, and the average of those two describes nothing that exists.

Week-to-week movement on a page with very few clicks is noise. If a page gets a handful of clicks a month, doubling and halving are the same event.

And CTR on branded searches is always high, because somebody who typed your company name was always going to click you. It tells you nothing about whether new customers can find you.

How often to look

Once a month is enough, and once a week is the most anyone should. The numbers move slowly, and checking daily mostly produces anxiety about normal variation.

What you are looking for over a few months is the shape: are impressions climbing, are clicks climbing with them, and are the queries in the list turning into the things you actually want to be hired for. If somebody is doing this work for you and cannot show you that shape in your own account, that is worth asking about.

If you would rather have somebody run it and send you a plain summary each month, we do that for $297 a month with the website included free — and the homepage gets designed first, at no charge, so you can see the work before you decide.