Six weeks ago I wrote to you about the figure Search Console opens on, and how it describes your site as it was rather than as it is. It does one other thing, and it had me fooled on my own site for the whole summer.
When someone searches for what you do, Google picks one of your pages to show them. You’d expect it to be the page you built for that search. For “website design telford”, the search I most want to win, it often wasn’t.
Over the summer my homepage climbed from 24 to 12 for that search. Over the same weeks, Search Console’s figure for it slid from 22 to 30. On 1 October I sent a message that read “frustrating that we can not make progress”, while the page that mattered had been making progress the whole time.
Why the number and the page disagreed
For a search term, Search Console counts whichever of your pages Google showed in each search, at that page’s position, and averages the lot. Most of the time Google showed my homepage. Some of the time it showed my general website design page, somewhere between 33 and 57, or my Shropshire page, or a Telford services page down between 62 and 90. Every one of those searches counted, and in any given week they left the figure 8 to 13 places below the page doing the work.
I’d like to blame Google for it. I can’t. I did it in 3 tidy-looking edits: a title on the website design page in May, a footer link on every page in July, and a homepage title in August that led with Shopify. Each one made sense on the afternoon I made it. Together they told Google that several of my pages were the answer to one question, and Google tried them all.
The 2-minute check
You can see whether it’s happening to you in about 2 minutes. In Search Console, open Performance, add a filter for the search you most want to win, then click the Pages tab. Every page listed there is one Google tried for that search.
If there’s only one, the figure is about that page. If there are several, some of your searches are counting at the wrong page’s position, and the fix is usually to decide which page is the answer and let the others give it back. I wrote about how that happens in keyword cannibalisation.
A week on
My fix went in on 23 August, and I finished it on 1 October by changing that footer link. In the week the footer change went in, the homepage averaged 18 for that search, and Google showed it in about half of those searches. So it hasn’t settled, and the page still isn’t on page one. I said in the full piece that I’d know in a fortnight, and the fortnight isn’t up.
What I know now is which number to watch while I wait, and it isn’t the one Search Console opens on.
