How to check your website hits

If you've ever opened Google Search Console to check your website hits, glanced at the clicks and impressions numbers, and closed the tab feeling none the wiser, you're not on your own. Most business owners I work with know the report exists, know it's "important," and have no real idea what they're supposed to be looking for beyond whether the numbers went up or down.

The headline numbers only tell you a small part of the story. The useful insight is usually means clicking a little deeper.

Here's what I actually look for when I open a client's report each month and steps you can take to check your website SEO performance.

Don't just look at the total — look at where it's coming from

Clicks and impressions at the top of the report tell you volume, not how healthy your website is. A site can have plenty of impressions and still be struggling, because impressions just mean Google showed your page to someone, it didn’t necessarily land near the top of the results, or entice people to click through.

The number that tells you more is average position, broken down by page and by search term. A page can be pulling in thousands of impressions while sitting on page four or five of Google, which looks encouraging at a glance but doesn’t mean much in practice. I'd always rather see fewer impressions at position 4 than a huge number at position 40.

Keep an eye on pages getting seen but not clicked

This is one of the most useful patterns to spot, and it's easy to miss if you're only scanning totals. Look for individual pages or search terms with decent impressions and a real position on page one or two, but very few or zero clicks.

That combination almost always points to the same thing: the page title or meta description isn't earning the click. Google is putting you in front of people, and the listing itself, the blue link and the couple of lines underneath it, isn't convincing them to choose you over the other results. It's one of the easiest fixes in SEO, because you're not creating anything new, just making an existing result work harder for you.

Update your meta descriptions and SEO title to entice people to click through, then make a note to check results two weeks from now. If you are making changes, remember to submit the URL in your GSC for crawling. Google will get around to crawling it but submitting might get it crawled quicker - worth a try anyway!

Find your "almost there" search terms

Take a look at your queries report there'll be a handful of search terms sitting at position 5, 8, or 12 — close enough to page one that a bit of focused attention could realistically move them, but not quite there yet. These are usually a better use of your time than chasing brand new keywords from scratch, because you're not starting from nothing. A stronger page, a few internal links pointing to it, or content that goes a little deeper than what's currently there can be enough to tip them over.

Check what's showing up in Search Appearance

This section gets overlooked, but it tells you whether Google is displaying anything extra alongside your listing — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, that kind of thing. If it's consistently empty, that's often a sign your structured data (the behind-the-scenes markup that helps Google understand your content) either isn't there or isn't working the way it should. It won't fix your rankings on its own, but it can meaningfully improve how many people click through once they do see you.

Resist judging everything from one month

A single month is just a snapshot, not a trend. Search results shift for all sorts of reasons — seasonality, algorithm updates, even just a handful of unusually high or low traffic days skewing the average. Before drawing any conclusions about what's working or what's gone wrong, it's worth comparing against a few previous months, not just eyeballing whichever period happens to be open and panicking.

A reminder

None of this is about chasing every number, It's simply about knowing which parts of the report actually tell you something useful, so the time you spend on your website goes toward the changes that matter — not just the ones that happen to be easiest to see.

If reading your own report still feels like a lot, this is something we cover in my 12 week SEO membership. You can find more details below