Why Is My Search Console “Position” Often Off?

And here I am explaining the MOST CONFUSING mystery in SEO: organic positions / rankings as reported by Google itself in its own Search Console 👇

As we may be losing data from third-party rank-tracking tools (or their reliability), we more and more discuss Google’s Search Console as the main source of your high-ranking keywords.

For each search query, Google will show your site’s “average position” (if enabled), a number of views and clicks it generated for your page.

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Search Console is limited to only 16 months of data, so you will not be able to see your historical rankings.

While Search Console is a great source of SEO data, it may be very confusing. More often than not, people cannot find an answer to a very common question:

Why can’t I see my site when searching while I see my “Average position” reported as #1?

There are two things to explain here.

1. Google results are personalized

In many cases, you see an average position as “1” and there’s no sign of your site in the top 20 or even 50 when searching for that query.

This is because the average position metric is reactionary, i.e. it shows where a page was shown to an actual user and Google’s search results are very dynamic and personalized:

• Fresh content may be pushed on top of search results temporarily.

• Some people may see your page ranking only because they recently visited it.

Google is showing your average position across all searchers who were able to see your site for each query.

Usually, when you don’t see your site ranking for a search query, the performance graph shows a quick temporal spike and no/few clicks.

The math is pretty easy, yet so many times misunderstood:

• If you are looking at the past 3 months of rankings

• And your site somehow showed up ONCE in three months at #1

  • I.e. your site was seen as #1 by ONE person out of 500,000

• Your average position will still be #1 within those three months

(1+0)/1=1)

Let’s see another example. Maybe that will be easier. This graph shows that the URL was seen for the given search query twice in three months, once in position #3 and once in position #2. In other words, it was seen by two people overall, and likely not seen by a million of other searchers. This assigns an individual position of this page to #2.5:

(2+3+0)/2=2.5

It makes mathematical sense but it is not very easy to use as marketing data.

You can filter out queries with less than 5 impressions and see what it does for your reports.

2. A position is only reported when there’s an impression

It could also be an impression from an image pack ranking for that query, not an organic result.

So a low number of impressions with a reported average position #1 is usually a bad sign.

In the above screenshot, for example, a single person saw your site when searching. This indicates a clear personalized result.

Overall, Search Console is not making it easy to track your rankings, so I suggest using tools like SEO Testing and Search Analytics for Sheets to create better reports.