The four numbers on the report
Clicks count how often people went from Google to your site. Impressions count how often a page of yours appeared in results, whether or not anyone scrolled to it. Click rate is clicks divided by impressions. Average position is where your page sat in the results, averaged over every time it appeared.
The average hides a lot. A page can rank first for one query and twentieth for another, and the report shows one blended number. Look at position by query, not only by page.
Set the report up
- Open Performance, then Search results.
- Set the date range to the last 28 days and turn on the comparison with the previous period.
- Switch on all four numbers above the chart.
- Scroll to the table. Start with Pages, then switch to Queries.
Search Console keeps about sixteen months of data, so if your business is seasonal you can also compare with the same weeks a year ago.
Three patterns worth acting on
- Shown often, rarely clicked. A page with many impressions and a click rate well below your other pages usually has a title or description that gives people no reason to choose it.
- Just off the first page. A page averaging position 8 to 20 for a query that matters is close enough to move with a clearer answer, better headings or a link from a related page.
- Queries with no matching page. A query that brings impressions to a page that only half answers it points to a page you could write.
Treat each one as a lead to check, not a conclusion. Search Console shows what happened, not why.
Judge a change fairly
Write down the date of the change, then compare the same number of days before and after. A holiday or a news story can move impressions with no change from you. If clicks rose but impressions did not, the title or description probably did the work. If impressions rose and clicks did not, something else changed.
Search Console also hides some queries to protect searchers’ privacy, so the listed queries add up to less than your total clicks. That is expected.
What the report cannot tell you
It does not show what visitors did after the click, such as whether they enquired or bought. For that you need Google Analytics or your own enquiry records. It also covers Google results only, not answers from AI assistants.
Make it a monthly habit
Pick one day a month, run the same three checks and keep a short note of what you changed. If you connect Search Console to Tractionora, it reads the same data with read-only access and lists these pages for you, with the evidence behind each one.