Website owners pick various channels to promote their business, usually at a high cost.
To get an analytic depth regarding the strengths and weaknesses of your work, you need some valid results.
Rather than investing more and more money on assumption-based data, it is better to get logical reasoning through relevant data.
SEO impressions with other KPIs offer valuable insight into the progress of your work.
Even if your SEO strategy delivers outstanding results, you need to collect data that helps you improve the strategy for the future.
To learn what SEO impressions mean and how they relate to a couple of other metrics, scroll down.
Read more: All You Need To Know About Google Search Console Keywords Research
What Are Impressions on Google Search Console?
The number of times the link is displayed on the page counts as an impression.
You can call SEO impressions a clickless method for tracking the rank of your website.
Initially, when using GSC, many people are confused about SEO impressions, given the number of times a website was seen by the audience.
In actuality, if your website ranks 9th on SERPs, you will get an impression of your ranking. As long as you rank on the first page, you will earn the same amount of impressions as the top three pages.
It is independent of whether the users scroll down to see your site or not.
KPIs on Google Search Console Relevant to Impressions
Google Search Console’s impressions KPIs include:
Total impressions: The aggregate count of the instances a website has been shown in the search results for a certain query.
Click-through Rate: The percentage of impressions that led to a click-through to the website.
Average Position: The rank a website holds for a certain search query.
Top Searches: The most popular searches that resulted in the page appearing in the search results.
How to Find SEO Impressions on GSC?
To view SEO impressions, navigate to the Performance area of the Search Console, followed by the Search Results section.
It should be noted that there is no information regarding ad clicks in the Search Console.
Instead, it just reports on impression network visits on a regular basis.
Multiple links in a search item are recorded differently regarding impressions for the site and URLs.
For instance, if the report contains five URLs for your website, the data grouped by site will only record one impression. However, the data grouped by page will record five impressions.
SEO impressions serve as a starting point for determining how visible and accessible your website is on SERPs.
Adding up Impressions by Page or Property
Aggregating SEO impressions gives a clearer picture of the visibility of your website.
Organizing SEO Impressions By Property
Gathering impressions at the property level helps assess the performance of each property you control. These may involve subdomains or international versions.
This is especially helpful for companies that sell a variety of products to a wide range of customers.
Gathering SEO Impressions By Page
This is a common technique for counting impressions for specific URLs. It lets you determine which pages rank highly in searches and which may require maintenance.
Classifying pages according to their kind, e.g., blog articles, product pages, and landing pages gives detailed insights into content success.
You may spot patterns and make comparisons by evaluating data that you aggregate.
Then, you can focus SEO efforts on the most promising areas of your website or specific pages that need immediate care.
SEO Impressions As a Leading Indicator
Many marketers suspect that SEO impressions may be an indirect ranking factor.
That aside, here are the guaranteed benefits of SEO impressions:
Visibility Gauge: How many impressions your website or content receives tells you how frequently it appears in search results. Many SEO impressions may indicate that your website appears in search results for various terms.
Potential Range: Impressions aid in your comprehension of the possible audience you may reach. Your website’s name, URL, and meta description are still visible to people who do not click on your listing.
Performance Insights: The Click-Through Rate (CTR) can be obtained by comparing impressions and clicks. A disparity between a high impression count and a low click-through rate may indicate problems with the meta descriptions or title tags.
Including Impressions Into Your SEO Plan
Impressions are a top-funnel metric and can provide useful information for your SEO strategy, such as:
Keyword Opportunities: You may determine high-volume keywords for which your website is visible by looking at the search queries that result in the most SEO impressions. Additional optimization raises your ranks and increases the amount of organic traffic you receive.
Optimize for Click-Through Rate (CTR): If some pages receive a lot of impressions but few clicks, you can review and improve their title tags and meta descriptions and even add structured data for better exposure.
Keep a Sharp Lookout for Algorithm Updates: An abrupt decrease or increase in SEO impressions may indicate modifications to search visibility. Awareness of these changes will enable you to modify your SEO tactics promptly.
Content Gaps: Low impressions for important keywords or subjects reveal issues with the content on the websites. You can create new content or optimize old sites to fix the content gaps.
When people search the Internet for answers to their problems and enter the keywords they wish to find, valuable keywords play a major role in website optimization.
Impact of Content on SEO Impressions
If you have written content around these terms, users can view the content on your website. This, of course, depends on how well your website ranks in the search results on the results page.
To rank higher for related keywords, you must also provide high-quality, timely, and updated content. Doing so will draw in more visitors and generate a lot of organic traffic to your website.
You need to focus on a few different things to produce content that is more popular with visitors.
For instance, you can look through other pages to determine what subjects people are most interested in, and you can try to raise your site’s rating using SEO-related articles.
After some time, you can also improve your site’s click-through rate (CTR) and the SEO impressions count.
Furthermore, the click-through rate and SEO impression count can work incredibly well together.
Eventually, the search engine robots will get a signal based on the quality of your website. It adjusts its ranking to make users notice it more and find the answers to their questions, thus resulting in a positive user experience.
Let’s move on to the relationship between SEO impressions and click-through rates.
What Does it Mean to Have High Impressions and Low CTRs?
High impressions and low CTRs indicate that a lot of people have seen your website and are aware of your brand. However, they also indicate that your brand is likely to fade into obscurity over time.
Taking these factors into consideration, we can conclude that an impression can influence the future rating that a website may receive.
Additionally, the search console indicates that only consistent visits can help us achieve our ultimate goal of increasing the number of impressions and, eventually, clicks on our website.
Impressions demonstrate that a link can still be valuable even if the users don’t click it.
You can determine the number of searches made for keywords in your content and the causes behind your website’s low search engine ranking by looking at SEO impressions.
10 Reasons for a High Impression Rate and a Low Click-through Rate
There are several circumstances that can cause a webpage to have a lot of SEO impressions but not many clicks:
1. Irrelevant Keywords: Even when the page appears in search results, consumers may not click on the link if the keywords aren’t related to the content.
For example, if your website appears on the second page of search results, it may receive a lot of impressions but not many clicks. That is because most users don’t bother to look past the first page.
2. Unattractive Meta Description: In a search result, the meta description is shown beneath the title. Users may not click on the link even though your webpage has one if it isn’t compelling enough.
3. Human Error: Due to human error, Google may give you a low ranking for a relevant query. In that scenario, search engines won’t click on your page. For instance, it may happen if the meta tags don’t offer the information they require.
4. Too Many Ads: If excessive ads appear as the top results in the search results. Users may not scroll down and click on the organic results if they encounter too many advertisements for a certain query. For example, there are no organic search results for this query that the user submits.
5. Absence of Visual Elements: The query may have a significant bias in favor of photos, and occasionally, those results may predominate over other results for the query. Your webpage may receive a lot of impressions but few clicks if it lacks an image or if you don’t optimize images.
6. Lack of Featured Snippets: For instance, when someone searches for an explanation of anything, they may not click on any links because Google answers their question directly in the search results. This is particularly valid for straightforward computations or definitions.
7. Absence of a Call to Action: Even if your website appears in search results, people may only be motivated to click on it if it has a clear call to action.
8. Poor-Quality Title Tags: When a user views a search result, the title tag is what they see first. Users may choose to click on it only if it is persuasive.
9. Bad Website Reputation: Users may decide to refrain from clicking on the results of a website with a bad reputation.
10. High Competition: Users may choose to click on more popular or authoritative results ranked for the same keywords.
What Affects the Google Search Console’s Impressions?
These factors affect the impressions in GSC:
Backlinks: Pages having a lot of high-quality backlinks from other websites have a higher chance of being viewed as authoritative by Google, which raises the SEO impressions count of those pages.
Technical SEO: Websites with strong technical SEO, such as quick load times and responsive design, have a higher chance of being chosen by Google’s algorithm, which raises the number of impressions they receive.
Relevance of Keywords: Pages optimized for particular keywords have a higher chance of showing up in the search results for those terms, increasing the number of SEO impressions they receive.
Content Quality: As mentioned a few times above, pages with useful, high-quality content have a higher chance of being chosen by Google for pertinent queries. Consequently, it increases SEO impressions.
Learn More: How to Use Google Search Console to Conduct an SEO Audit
FAQs
Do positive reviews affect SEO impressions?
Making sure that your website has a lot of favorable customer reviews is one approach to help it look better. Positive reviews improve the likelihood of a website showing up as a relevant result for prospective visitors. That can boost the number of impressions on your page.
Do ads help with SEO impressions count?
Yes, targeted advertising is a method of raising the SEO impressions of your website. You can raise the likelihood that potential visitors will see your website by running advertisements on related websites.
What is the difference between SEO impressions and clicks?
When someone clicks on your page and visits your website, that is known as a click. Conversely, an impression is the number of times a user has viewed your page.
What is a good number of SEO impressions?
There is no set standard defining the number of impressions your website should have.
Should I track the performance of new content?
Yes, when publishing new content, make sure it answers the audience’s questions. Once published, measure the SEO impressions and clicks.
In Conclusion
SEO impressions are valuable insights into the visibility and reach of your website and content.
If you want to increase the rate of impressions in GSC, resolve the problems right after you identify them.
Creating high-quality content using a keyword strategy, internal linking, and backlinking are steps you need to take for site-wide improvement.
If you lack the resources to carry out these tasks, feel free to delegate them to The Dreams Agency.