Measure SEO Results with QuerySeek

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Want to know if your SEO efforts are paying off? Tracking the right metrics is crucial to understanding your website’s performance and improving your click volume. In this article, we'll discuss what the available metrics mean, and how QuerySeek Change Reports combine them to give you a clear understanding of how your updates are performing.

The following three terms are measured in quantities, i.e., the number of times an event happened.

Search Volume is the total number of searches for a keyword, whether or not your page appears in the results. This data is tracked by Google AdWords.
Impressions are the number of times your search result showed up on someone's screen. This data is tracked by Google Search Console.
Clicks are the number of times someone clicked on your search result. This data is also tracked by Google Search Console.

Image depicting funnel from volume to impressions to clicks.

You can think of these quantity-based metrics as a funnel. The top of the funnel is Search Volume, if the search engine thinks your page may be what the user is looking for, your search result will receive an Impression. If the user then clicks on your search result, you'll achieve a Click.

In addition to the quantity-based metrics listed above, a couple more metrics are worth understanding.

Average Search Position is the average place that Google positioned your page when it appeared as an impression. There can be a substantial amount of variability in this result, so while position is an indicator of how much Google values your page as a response to the query, it's an average and impression-by-impression results may vary dramatically.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of times someone clicks on your page out of the number of impressions the page received. You'll usually see a correlation between Position and Click-Through Rate since results that appear earlier in the results will usually get more eyes and clicks. However, it is possible to have an outlying page that either under-performs or over-performs the typical CTR at a position.

It's possible that you have something that you want the user to do after they've clicked over to your site. That's called a Conversion and is at the bottom of the funnel. In this guide, we're going to ignore Conversions and consider Clicks as our main goal.

Challenges Measuring SEO Results

Google Search Console contains a lot of the data necessary to evaluate search performance of pages, but it can be difficult to navigate and easy to come away with the wrong conclusions due to unhelpful aggregation and incomplete information about external variables that affect click performance.

Average Search Position can show you if you're generally moving up or down in the rankings, but position is only one input of many variables that go into click volume. When you're near the top of the search results, aligning with user intent and presenting an appealing Search Engine Results Page (SERP) entry can be even more important than being in the first couple of results.

Additionally, search volume isn't static from season to season. Things that are popular in the summer can be forgotten in the winter. Any minor holiday or weird viral trend can make it hard to understand what's going on with your search results. Therefore, looking at raw click and impression numbers can present a misleading picture.

Even when your page is highly ranked, impressions as reported by Google Search Console are not a good substitute for search volume due to all of the things Google does with the SERP. For instance, if your content is unlucky enough to be on the far right-hand side of a carousel or below an AI Overview it might not get an impression, so you really don't know how popular a keyword was.

QuerySeek Change Reports

QuerySeek Change Reports are built to address these issues mentioned above while evaluating changes to your website. It gathers click and impression data for each keyword from Google Search Console, and merges it with Volume data from Google AdWords to present an intuitive graph.

To access the Change Reports in QuerySeek, navigate to the Pages feature and select the "Recent Change Reports" option from the drop down menu at the top of the page.

In the following chart, you can see a QuerySeek Change Report for a Crispy Chicken Thigh recipe.

The report is for a change that happened Sept 27. It compares data from the months before and after that change, August and October.

The circled values in the "Difference" column of the table are the comparison top-line numbers. You can see that clicks are down 24% while volume is essentially flat at -3%. In the subsequent vertical bar graph, you can see that some keywords had positive click movement but the overall vibe of the blue clicks bars is trending in the wrong direction. Crispy Chicken Thighs recipe with less Clicks but steady Volume

To look a little deeper into the chart, it can be helpful to look at search position movement. You can see that positioning for "bone-in chicken thighs with spaghetti sauce" and "chicken thighs tomato sauce" dropped. Crispy Chicken Thighs recipe showing position changes

Hovering over one of the position bars will show you the difference between average August and October positions. For example, in the following image, you can see that "chicken thighs tomato sauce" dropped from an average position of 6.1 down to an average position of 8.3. Graph showing a tooltip presenting a drop of two spots.

As discussed earlier, this website change has performed poorly compared to Google Ads Volume data. There are factors outside of the content change that may have played a role in this mediocre performance such as search algorithm updates and SERP changes, so a researcher may want to dig further into what other factors that may be in play. The numbers here are low enough that the sample size may be too small to spend much effort on reversing the trend, but it's worth noting performance of this change while choosing other changes to make on the site.

As contrast to the above example, the following Vegetarian Chili recipe change was wildly successful. It only received one click in December 2023, and received 26 clicks in February 2024. The keyword popularity was higher in February, but this recipe's performance outpaced the volume increase handily. In future articles, we'll talk about how to find pages with similar characteristics to pre-change Vegetarian Chili so this success can be replicated. Change Report showing a change that out-performed Google Ads Volume.

Summary

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While it can be difficult to measure the SEO performance of website changes due to a complicated constellation of variables, QuerySeek Change Reports clarify the performance of your changes by combining Google AdWords data with Click, Impression, and Position data from Google Search Console and present that data in a usable way.

Contact QuerySeek to discuss your SEO challenges and concerns, or Start a Free QuerySeek trial today!