Search Console Performance Report

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that allows webmasters to access information about how their site is being crawled, indexed, and served in Google search results.

Today, we’re going to focus on the “Performance Report.”

This is not related to site speed, but Search Console does have other sections related to that kind of performance.

This report is all about how your website’s pages are performing in Google organic search!

To access the report, log into GSC (Google Search Console), select your property, and click “Performance.” You can also click “Full report” on the Performance overview from the dashboard.

Parts of the Performance Report

For this guide, we’ll focus on the basics. But you’ll still need to get familiar with the parts of the performance report.

Specifically, you need to know about filters, metrics, and dimensions.

Filters

By default, a filter for “Web” and date range of “Last 3 months” will be applied.

For most tasks, these filters are a great starting point!

If you click on “Search Type: Web” you can change this to view image results in organic search. While this won’t give you data about individual images, it will show you data about the URL containing the images shown in Google search (both the images tab and other SERP features).

The date range filter allows you to pick from a variety of preset options, set a custom date range, or even compare date ranges (very handy for diagnosing changes in traffic or ranking over a specific period of time).

Clicking the +new button allows you to add a new filter. For this post, we’ll only focus on the query and page filter options.

You can add query and page filters manually with this menu.

Note that you have the option to set an exact value for a filter, or you can include/exclude parts of queries or pages.

We’ll get to some examples of how you might want to use this in a few minutes.

But first I also want to note that you can add an exact match query or page filter by clicking them in the data table. You remove filters by clicking the “x” in the filter bubble.

Metrics

By default, clicks and impressions will be displayed in the graph and the data table.

You can enable or disable the display of metrics by clicking them.

Now that “Average position” is turned on, it will be displayed in the graph and data table. Hover over the graph to see data for each day.

Quick definitions:

Clicks: number of times someone clicked one of your pages in the search results.

Impressions: number of times one of your pages was loaded into the browser of a searcher.

CTR: Click-through rate: the click count divided by the impression count.

Position: the order (rank) where your page showed up in the list of search results.

Dimensions

For this post, we’re only going to focus on the Queries and Pages dimensions.

Basically, you can choose whether you want to see a list of queries, or a list of pages.

By default this will be sorted by clicks, but you can sort by other metrics, or alphabetically by URL.

You can see more results with the navigation in the bottom right of the data table.

5 Common tasks in Google Search Console

Search Console is a powerful tool, but it isn’t always easy to get intuitive, actionable insights when you log in and look at the performance report.

Here are the top 5 things I recommend learning how to answer using GSC.

1. Find out where you are ranking for a specific topic or keyword

To do this, you’ll need to add a query filter.

You can use an exact match query filter if you want to see the ranking for a SINGLE search term, but you can use a “queries containing” filter if you want to see data about close variations of the same keyword.

Let’s try both ways.

First, I’ll add a filter for Queries containing “engagement”

I also turned on the “Position” metric by clicking it.

This report will now show me all queries containing “engagement” where *any page* on my site has received an impressions.

In the following chart, my site was served to 23 searchers who used the exact search term “places to take engagement photos near me”. On average, it was in position 51.7 (~page 6, since each page has ~10 results). That resulted in 2 clicks.

But what if you want to see the ranking each day for a specific term?

You can add it as an exact match filter by clicking it in your list of queries, or choosing exact match in the query filter window.

Now we’ll see a chart that shows the selected metrics, for each day in the selected time period.

Just hover over the graph to see the metrics for each day.

2. Get a list of keywords for a specific page

For this task, we’ll need to add a page filter.

You can do this by selected it from a list of pages in the data table, or with the add filter button.

Once that filter is added, make sure the “Queries” dimension is selected in the data table.

This is now a list of queries specifically for the filtered page.

This is a good time to note that you can export these results to Google Sheets, Excel or a .csv!

I often like doing this when I’m sorting and comparing keywords.

3. Find out if two pages are competing for the same keyword

You might have heard someone talk about “keyword cannibalization.”

This is basically when Google is undecided on which page from your domain is the best result for a specific query.

In this situation, it is possible for these pages to be “competing” for position on the same keyword.

To spot keyword cannibalization, start with a query filter for a keyword you’d like to check.

In this example, I’ll add an exact match query filter for “alt text for photographers”.

Make sure to click the “Pages” dimension, and we’ll be able to see a list of all pages that have received impressions for the term “alt text for photographers.”

In this case, the top page is the one I want to rank.

It has been served 106 times in this time period, and on average, it is in position #1. This has resulted in 19 clicks.

However, my Image SEO post is also showing up for this term. It has been served 71 times, in an average position of 27.9.

This meets my personal threshold for “keyword cannibalization.” I flag these when the number of impressions for any secondary page is at least 30% as much as the top page.

In this *specific* example, it may not be a problem (since it is likely Google is just showing both of these results, and clearly ranks the intended post in the first position). But I’ll still investigate to make sure there aren’t issues.

If people are interested, I can dig much further into keyword cannibalization in a future post (leave me a comment if you’d like to see that). There is also an entire lesson and flowchart for how to deal with keyword cannibalization in the SEO course.

4. See how rankings have changed over time

This task should help you get familiar with the date comparison feature in Search Console.

Let’s compare the past 3 months with the “previous period” (the 3 months before that).

This report can get very overwhelming and difficult to read, so let’s take my typical process one step at a time.

First, I’ll make sure only clicks/impressions are displayed. Then I’ll view the pages dimension and sort by clicks difference (a new metric for this view).

A positive number here means this page has received MORE clicks in the past 3 months than it did the 3 months before that.

We can click “clicks difference” again to sort by pages that have lost clicks.

Now let’s add one of these potential problem pages as an exact match page filter by clicking it in the list.

Once that is added, we’ll click to the “Queries” dimension to see a list of queries for this page. Now is a good time to turn the “position” metric back on as well.

This chart can be overwhelming, and sometimes you’ll have to dig further to interpret what the numbers are telling you.

I think of it as a good way to start asking the right questions.

This will let you figure out if demand has changed (lower impressions but the same position), ranking has changed (lower position this period than last), or if fewer people are clicking despite the same ranking/impressions.

5. Find “striking distance” keywords

I define “striking distance keywords” as keywords where the impressions are meaningful (let’s say at least 10 per month, but you can set this threshold wherever you want based on your traffic), but your position is 10-15 (first half of the second page).

Often, a slight improvement in how you use these keywords on the page can help you move to page 1!

To start, let’s add a page filter so we can narrow down which page we’d like to improve.

In this example I’m choosing my blog post about the “trade up game.”

I’ll actually go ahead and export the data from this page to a Google Sheet once I’ve added the filter.

I sorted the sheet by position, highlighted everything in the 10-15 range, and looked for terms with enough impressions to be meaningful.

I’ll usually go back to my post and use the “ctrl+f” or “cmd+f” shortcut to “find in page” and then search for these keywords.

See, in this post I didn’t even use the term “how to play” – and it is an obvious thing I could improve. People searching for this post very likely want to know how to play the game!

While this example didn’t find any *major* opportunities, don’t sleep on this! I’ve been able to find some really great insights from this exercise.

Need more help understanding Search Console?

If you have questions about how to use the performance report, leave them in the comments below!

If you want to work with me directly, you can book a call where we will go over your Search Console and answer any questions you may have.

Hourly Consulting ($375/hr)

Course students can book these calls at a discounted rate ($99), or come to my weekly office hours calls where we can answer specific questions using GSC easily (at no additional cost).