The Search tab

The Search tab is your own Google Search Console data, arranged around one question: which pages and searches are worth doing something about.

It needs Google connected. See connecting Google Search Console.

At the top it names its source and the property in use, such as "From Google Search Console · Domain property: redmonark.com". <!-- example -->

The four figures

Clicks, how many people came to your site from search.

Impressions, how many times a page of yours was shown in results.

Click-through rate, clicks divided by impressions. The number that says whether people who see you are interested.

Average position, where you sit in results on average.

Each carries its change against the previous period, or "No change".

Under them, the daily clicks chart for the range you have selected.

Ranges

Seven days, 28 days, three months, twelve months and sixteen months.

Sixteen months is as far back as Google will give. It is the useful one for asking whether this year is better than last, because it spans two of the same season.

Twenty-eight days is the default, and the right one for asking whether last month's work did anything.

Your clicks, all the way back

A longer chart with an explanation worth reading: "The pale line is each day; the solid one is a 28-day average, because search traffic has a weekly rhythm that hides the trend."

That weekly rhythm is why a daily chart alone misleads. Most business sites drop every weekend, so any two adjacent days can look like a crisis or a triumph depending on which two you pick. The averaged line is the one to read.

What moved this month

Three counts against the previous 28 days: searches that moved up, held still and moved down, with the clicks attached to each.

The panel is careful about what it compares: "Searches with enough impressions in both periods to be a real comparison, not a gap in the data." A search that had four impressions last month and none this month has not collapsed; it was never measured properly.

Pages that gained, pages that lost

Two lists of the biggest moves against the previous 28 days.

Pages losing ground carries the most useful sentence on the page: "The ranking change beside the click change is what says which kind of problem it is — a page that held its position and lost clicks has lost its audience, not its ranking."

That distinction decides what you do. A page that fell from four to eleven has a ranking problem, and the fix is usually links or content. A page that held position and lost clicks has a snippet problem, or the results page changed around it, and the fix is usually the title.

When nothing moved enough to be worth reporting, the panels say so rather than showing noise.

Where your traffic is stuck

The panel that turns the data into a decision. It plots how often you were shown at each position against how often anybody clicked, and picks out the searches sitting well below your own line.

Those are the rewrites. The ranking is already there; only the invitation to click is missing. As the panel puts it, nothing needs to reach number one: moving from twelfth to eighth is the whole job.

Queries and Pages

Two pills under the headline figures.

Queries lists the searches, with clicks, impressions, position and change.

Pages lists your pages with the same columns, sorted by clicks.

Both are sortable. On a page row you can jump straight to Fixes for this page, which filters the fix list to that URL, so a page that lost ground goes from a number to a list of things to change in one click.

The Connection panel

At the bottom: which property is in use, a range picker, a sync button and Disconnect. Covered in connecting Google Search Console.

When it is empty

Several honest states rather than one blank page. Not connected offers the connection. Connected with nothing synced explains that the first sync has not run and offers to run it. A lapsed connection explains that reconnecting brings the numbers straight back. And no searches recorded in a period says so rather than showing zeroes as though they were measurements.

Where to go next

The Fixes tab is where this data becomes work. Competitors is who else is winning the same searches.