How to Understand the Data in Google Search Console (Without Losing Your Mind)

If you’ve ever opened up Google Search Console (GSC) and immediately felt overwhelmed by the charts, filters, and confusing terms, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most powerful free SEO tools out there, but it’s also super easy to misread the data.

BTW, if you still haven’t set up your free account, here’s how to get started in GSC.

I made this video walking through the basics, but if you’re more of a reader, this post will help you break it all down. We’ll go through the metrics that confuse people the most (impressions, click-through rate, average position, and indexing) and help you actually make sense of what you’re seeing. I’m going to answer the most common questions and misconceptions I see that people have about GSC.

Quick visual overview of how to use GSC.

• Full Video Transcript

  Intro to Google Search Console

  Let me just show you the basics of what you can see in Google Search Console. This is my favorite tool to understand what’s happening with your organic search, so I always tell every business owner that you should make sure that you have this set up as soon as possible so that you have data to refer to.

  I’m always amazed by how many don’t. So when you first go to Google Search Console you’ll see an overview that just kind of shows you how many clicks you get, which pages are indexed. I don’t really use this page very much, but this performance page is where you’ll probably spend most of your time.

  Here you can see the total impressions that you’re getting, which is not necessarily somebody seeing your search results but just that your search results exist somewhere — even if it’s on the fifth page of a search that somebody doesn’t even click to. The fifth page for that counts as an impression. So it just shows that you’re relevant.

  And then total clicks to your link in the organic search results.

  You can change how many days you want to see here — if you want to just see like the past month or so, or if you want to see a longer period of time, you can set that however you’d like.

  When you’re looking at the clicks and the impressions, one thing that you’ll notice when you first set up a website, or maybe if you first start optimizing it, is you might see for the first one to three months you might not really see much of anything with your impressions. And then you should start to see like a good growth happen.

  This website’s much older, so we don’t have that here, but you should start to see a growth start to happen at some point. And then clicks might follow pretty closely behind, or it might take clicks a little bit longer to catch up. If you’re getting a lot of impressions but you’re not ranking on the first page for things, then it’s not going to translate to clicks. But the more you work on optimizing it, and the older the website gets, then the more the clicks will start to match with that.

  Understanding CTR & Average Position

  The other things you can see up here are the average click-through rate and the average position. So I’ll tell you what those are.

  The click-through rate is the amount of impressions divided by the clicks that people are actually clicking on from there. So the average click-through rate is kind of a difficult data point to look at sometimes, because as you get more and more impressions, as you start ranking for more and more keywords, some of those are going to be on the fifth, sixth page, while others might be on the first. And that’s actually going to hurt your click-through rate — your average click-through rate here.

  So it’s not really the best data point to look at. Average position is somewhat similar to that, where you might be ranking for a keyword…

  If you look down here, these are all keywords that are related to one single blog post. And so you notice that there are multiple keywords ranking for a single blog post, and some of those might rank way higher or way lower than each other. And the more keywords that you have ranking on your website, the more that average position is going to change.

  I hope that all makes sense to you. So I’m just going to click all of these again so I can show you down below here the different things you can see.

  Search Queries Breakdown

  So down here you can see the queries. These are the actual keywords that people are typing into the search bar where your website is showing up.

  You can see — let’s just make the list a little longer — you can see the number of clicks to those keywords, the impressions (remember, the impressions doesn’t mean it’s on the first page that they see it, but it’s there somewhere), the click-through rate, and the position.

  The average position. The position will change daily, hourly, whatever — but it’s an average.

  You can also sort these. So if you wanted to sort by the lowest position, the highest position, or if you want to sort by the number of impressions, this kind of tells you what’s the most popular keywords that are out there. Or if you want to sort by clicks, which means these are the ones that are most effective for you.

  You can also look at your pages to see which pages are performing the best, which pages might need some work. And once again, you can sort by all of those things.

  Audience Data: Countries, Devices & Dates

  You can see which countries people are viewing your website from, what kind of devices. This is really helpful to see if a lot of people are using mobile — which, for most websites, people are — so make sure that you’re optimizing for mobile.

  How it’s showing up, and specific dates.

  You can also — what I find really helpful — is to use this filter. So say you want to look at only… If you have an e-commerce website, you only want to look at a collection. Or you only want to look at your collection pages, or a specific category. You can filter for that.

  This one is not that. Let’s look at maybe just filter for the blog post pages.

  So to do this you would have the URL that contains whatever is specific to that URL slug that you have for the section that you want to look at, and apply. And then you can see only the pages that have that.

  You can also, if you want to see which keywords are targeting for a specific page, you can click on the page and it’ll show you the queries that people are typing into the search bar that are bringing them to that page. And here is really helpful because you can see some of these are getting a lot more impressions — like “Northern Germany,” that’s getting a lot of impressions because it’s typed in more.

  However, “Northern Germany” doesn’t necessarily fit the intent of a blog post about understanding the culture of Northern Germany. So some of these other keywords are actually better for that page for you.

  That’s some of the data that you can use, and it’s super, super helpful to look at.

  URL Inspection Tool

  Another very helpful thing on here that you can do is a URL inspection.

  To do this, you would pick any web page — I already did this one — any web page that you have on your website. And you can search it to see: is it indexed by Google? If it’s not indexed it will not show up in search results.

  So if it’s not indexed, you can request indexing. And you can also use this area to see maybe why it’s not getting indexed.

  If it’s not indexed, it’ll show you a lot of information. If it is indexed, it doesn’t really show you why… it doesn’t show you that. Obviously I’ll find one that’s not indexed to demonstrate for you.

  But you can also see this kind of information too, like: okay, these things aren’t getting loaded, see if there’s anything in there that’s a problem.

  Let’s find a page that’s not indexed.

  So if you click on Pages, you can see all of your pages that are indexed versus the pages that are not indexed. And you can see down here maybe why some of those pages are not getting indexed. Some of them, they shouldn’t be indexed. Some of them, maybe they should. Maybe they’re discovered but they’re not currently indexed, or they’re crawled not currently indexed.

  You can click on these and these will show you all of these pages here. So some of these things — like this one — I sure would like this page to be indexed, it’s a blog post. So we’re going to inspect that URL and it’s going to tell us it is not on Google, it is not indexed.

  As we look through here we can see if we can suss out any reason why it’s not. It is in the sitemap, it does have a referring page, we don’t know why it’s not, but we can request it to get indexed. And it just takes a minute… or a few minutes. There we go, index requested.

  Okay, now the first thing you should do when you set up your Google Search Console is add your sitemap and submit it. Um, that is extremely important so that it’s there, so that they know what to search for.

  You can also find other things on here like Remove, which you probably won’t need to do very often. Core Web Vitals — this will basically just link you to PageSpeed Insights, which is where you can measure the speed of your website.

  Um, you can also find if there are any security issues here. If you have any non-HTTPS URLs, you would want to remove those so that you only have secure links.

  And down here you want to check for manual actions: no issues detected — good. And security issues: no issues detected — good. If you see anything here that is telling you it’s a problem, you should fix it, and there will be information on how to fix that on there.

  One other cool thing you can see on Google Search Console is Links. This will show you, um, internally: pages that are getting linked to, like you’re linking to yourself within your own website. Externally: pages that are getting linked to, so people that are linking to you outside of your website. And then the websites that are linking to you here, um, and then the text that is being used — like the anchor text that is being used for the linking. This is really helpful information to see where you’re getting linked from.

  And it gives you a good idea of how your internal linking is going. Like notice some of these are very low on internal linking and could use more.

  Um, so that’s it. That’s the main things I wanted to show you on here. It is such a, such an important tool to have, and it’s completely free.

  The earlier you set it up, the more data you actually have to look at and the more you can do with that data. I can’t tell you how many clients I have started working with that do not have Google Search Console set up. So then we have to set it up, and then we don’t have any data to work with.

  You know, I mean, it takes a couple months to really have helpful information from it. So the earlier you can get it set up, the better.

  And I hope this was helpful for you.

What does “Impressions” mean in Google Search Console?

This one trips up a lot of people. An “impression” doesn’t mean someone saw your site and considered clicking. It just means your page appeared somewhere in the search results, even if that was on page 8.

So if you’re seeing thousands of impressions and almost no clicks, that doesn’t mean your content is bad, it might just mean your page is showing up low in the rankings.

Example: One of my pages shows up for over 70 different keywords (including “a week in seattle”, “one week in seattle” and “seattle trip itinerary”. Notice they are all variations of the same topic, yet considered different keywords.) Some of them rank in the top 5, but others are buried in positions 60–90. Still, every time it shows up (even way down in the SERPs), that counts as an impression.

Why am I getting high impressions but barely any clicks?

This usually means one of four things:

1. You’re ranking for a lot of keywords, but some of them are low-ranked (or could be irrelevant).

2. You’re ranking low for keywords with high search volume, so you’re getting seen (kind of), but not clicked.

3. Your titles or meta descriptions might not be enticing enough for people to click when you do appear in decent positions.

4. You’re ranking for queries that are getting answered in AI Overviews.
   
   Take a look at your queries report in GSC and sort by impressions. Ask yourself: “Would I click on this if I saw it in search results?” Also consider if you’re showing up for search terms that don’t actually match what your page offers.

Why is my click-through rate (CTR) so low?

This is where the confusion around impressions really messes with CTR. When your page gets tons of impressions from low-ranking placements, your CTR is going to look super low, even if you’re getting a decent number of clicks from higher-ranked queries.

Don’t panic. Low CTR doesn’t always mean your SEO is failing. It might just mean your content is appearing in more places. That’s actually a good sign. You’re showing up!

Instead of stressing about overall CTR, look at individual pages or queries with solid rankings (positions 1–10). That’s where improving CTR will make the biggest difference.

What does “Average Position” actually mean?

This one is tricky. Google Search Console averages your rankings across all keywords your page ranks for. So if one page ranks #2 for one keyword and #98 for another, the average is going to land somewhere in the middle, making your page ranking look worse than it actually is.

That’s why you might see an “average position” of 23 and still see yourself ranking on the first page for your target keyword.

Tip: Always drill down into individual queries to get the real picture.

How can I see what my site is actually ranking for?

Go to:

• Performance → Search Results

• Use the filters to look at individual pages or queries

• Sort by impressions or clicks to see what’s really going on
  
  

This view helps you understand what terms are driving your traffic and where you might be ranking lower than expected.

What does normal growth look like for a new website?

New websites often start with a slow climb in impressions, followed by clicks catching up later. This is totally normal. I’ve seen new sites take months to get even a trickle of traffic.

So if your impressions are growing but your clicks aren’t there yet, you’re on the right path. Keep publishing high-quality, useful content. And keep optimizing. The clicks will come if your content is good.

Why aren’t my pages showing up in search results?

Your page may not be indexed. If your pages aren’t indexed, they won’t show up in Google’s search results at all. You can check if a page is indexed by going to the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and pasting in your URL.

If it says “URL is not on Google,” here’s what I usually tell people:

Indexing can be so frustrating sometimes! But one thing to know is that it takes time. Pages on brand new sites can sometimes take months to index. On that page, you can request indexing. Check back in a few days to see if it has crawled your site. If not, you may be lacking in authority in your website or your content might not be worth indexing in the bots eyes. To build authority of your site, work on building up some quality backlinks.

What can I do if my pages aren’t getting indexed?

Here are a few things to check if your pages aren’t being picked up by Google:

1. Blocked - Are you accidentally blocking the pages with a noindex tag or robots.txt file?

2. Content qualilty - Is your content thin or duplicated elsewhere? 

3. Page depth - Are these pages more than 3 clicks from your homepage?

4. Crawl budget - Are you blocking unnecessary pages with robots.txt? Is your sitemap too bloated?

5. Internal links - Are you linking to these pages from other pages outside of your nav menu?

6. Related content - Do you have enough other content to support this topic?

7. Backlinks - Do any other websites link to these pages?

8. Content quality - Is your content useful, original, and well-structured?

9. Crawl requests - When was your sitemap last crawled? Were these pages created afterward?
   
   

If everything looks good and it’s just a waiting game, hang in there. It’s super common for indexing to be slow on new sites while they build authority. I’ve had pages that took 4–5 months to index, and they eventually started pulling in traffic. Work on getting other good sites to link to your pages.

Final Thoughts

Google Search Console is incredibly helpful once you know what you’re looking at. But it can also be misleading if you don’t understand how impressions, CTR, and ranking are calculated.

If you’re seeing impressions grow, even without clicks yet, celebrate that! It’s the first sign your site is getting noticed by Google.

And if you want help interpreting your GSC data or building an SEO strategy that actually gets clicks, let’s work together. I offer full SEO audits and ongoing support to help you make sense of your data and turn it into growth.