Ranking

What your ranking tells you

A ranking is the position of a page in search results for a particular query. In practice there's no single ranking: results vary by location, device, language, personalisation and time. Search Console's "average position" is an average across all the times your page appeared, which smooths out some of that variation.

Where to find it

Use Search Console's average position alongside impressions and clicks for queries you care about. For local searches, check from your phone in different parts of your area. If you use a rank tracker, choose a sensible list of phrases tied to services, not one designed to look good.

Reading it in practice

A dentist is told by a provider that he ranks first for "dental practice with parking near the high street". Search Console shows the phrase has almost no impressions. His real priority, "emergency dentist" plus his town, sits at position nine. That becomes the focus.

Misreadings to avoid

• Trusting a single manual search from your own office.
• Celebrating positions for phrases nobody searches.
• Expecting rankings to stay still. They move constantly.
• Paying anyone who guarantees a position.

Why it’s worth tracking

Rankings are useful as a sign of visibility, but they're easy to misread. A report showing first place for an obscure phrase nobody searches means nothing. A page in position six for a busy local service search may bring more customers than a page at number one for something rarely searched.

For local businesses, rankings vary street by street. A café might be first in the map for someone across the road and absent for someone a mile away, which is why single checks from your own premises mislead.

Terms you’ll see alongside it

• SERP: Search engine results page: the page of results a search engine shows for a query.
• Impressions: How often a page appeared in search results.
• CTR: Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
• Core update: A broad Google ranking update affecting many queries.