How to read the search terms report in Search Console

Google Search Console shows the actual words people typed into Google before your website appeared, and whether they clicked. Google calls these "queries", and they live in the Performance report. Four numbers sit next to each one: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. Once you know what each means and what to ignore, ten minutes a month in this report tells you more about your customers' wording than any marketing tool.

Finding the report

If your site is already in Search Console:

Go to Search Console and pick your site.
In the left menu, click Performance, then Search results.
Below the chart, make sure the Queries tab is selected.

If your site is not in Search Console yet, Google Search Console for small business owners explains how to add it. The report starts collecting once the site is verified, so there will be nothing to see on day one.

The four numbers, plainly

At the top of the report are four boxes. Click them to show or hide each line on the chart, and the same columns appear in the table of queries below.

Impressions

How many times your site appeared in someone's search results. The person did not have to scroll down to it or click it, it only had to be on the page they were shown. High impressions with few clicks means people see you but choose something else.

Clicks

How many times someone clicked through to your site from Google's results. This is the number closest to real visitors.

CTR (click-through rate)

Clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage. It tells you how often people who saw your result chose it. It is naturally low for searches where you appear far down, and higher for searches of your own business name.

Average position

Roughly where your site appeared in the results, on average, where 1 is the top. It is an average across every time you appeared, so a page that showed up near the top on some searches and much lower on others ends up in between. Treat it as a rough guide, not a fixed spot. The map results and other boxes also affect what the person actually sees.

Setting the report up to be useful

The default view shows the last three months. Two settings help:

Date range. Click the date filter at the top and choose a longer period, such as twelve or sixteen months. For a small business, three months is often too little data to show a pattern, and the longer view shows seasons.
Compare. In the same date menu, choose Compare and pick this period against the same period last year. This is the fairest comparison for seasonal trades, because it sets this October against last October rather than against summer.

You can sort the table by clicking any column heading. Start by sorting by Impressions, high to low.

What to look for

Your own business name

The top queries for most local businesses are their own name and variations of it. That is normal and healthy: people who already know you are searching to find your number or address. If your name is missing from the list, or gets impressions but few clicks, check what your result looks like when you search it. Google search results for your own business name covers what to fix there.

The words customers actually use

Below your name you will see the services people searched for. This is the valuable part. Note the exact words. Do customers search "AC repair" or "air conditioning repair"? "Dog grooming" or "pet grooming"? "Dentist" or "dental office"? If their words differ from the words on your site, use theirs on your pages.

Searches you appear for but rarely get clicked

Sort by impressions and look for queries with many impressions and very few clicks. Two common reasons:

Your result is far down the page, so people rarely see it. The average position will be high.
Your result does appear near the top, but the title and description do not look like an answer to that search. In that case, rewriting the page's title and description can help.

Searches you did not expect

You may find searches for services you do not offer, or towns you do not serve. Those are useful too: if many people search "boat storage" and you only do boat repair, maybe a sentence on your page saying you do not offer storage, and pointing to someone who does, will save calls. Or maybe it is a business idea.

What the report does not show

Every search. Google hides rare searches for privacy, so the queries in the table add up to less than the total at the top. That is normal.
Map results in full. The Performance report covers your website in Google's search results. Calls and direction requests from your Business Profile are counted separately, in the profile's own performance view.
Other search engines. Bing has its own version, in Bing Webmaster Tools.
What happened after the click. Search Console stops at the click. Whether the visitor called you is a different question. Counting website enquiries covers how to track that.

Reading it without panicking

Numbers go up and down. A week of fewer impressions is rarely meaningful for a small business. Look at months, and compare with the same months last year. A sudden drop to near zero is different: it usually means something technical changed, such as a site move or a setting that hides pages, and is worth investigating straight away.

Also keep in mind that more impressions do not automatically mean more customers. A page that appears for many loosely related searches can collect impressions without bringing a single call.

What to do this week

Open the Performance report, set the date range to the last twelve months, and sort by impressions.
Write down the ten most common service searches, in customers' exact words.
Check your service pages use those words.
Find one query with many impressions and few clicks, and look at your result for it.
Set a monthly reminder to compare this month with the same month last year.

If the report shows people searching for services your site barely mentions, and adding them means wrestling with an old editor, you can see your site rebuilt first and compare how it covers what your customers search for.