Average position

One number stretched over thousands of searches

Search reports do not record a ranking. They record a spot for every single time one of your pages appeared in somebody's results, then average the whole pile.

Say your site sits first for a phrase that never brings work, and eleventh for the phrase that actually does, and both turn up in about the same number of searches. The report averages the two and hands you a six. There is no search anywhere in which you rank sixth. The arithmetic is honest and the picture is useless.

Read the figure as a direction of travel across months, not as a score. The question worth asking is which queries moved, not what the average did.

There is a second catch built into how the figure is collected. It only counts searches where you appeared at all. Every query a competitor owns outright, every phrase you rank nowhere for, contributes nothing to it. A site can hold a respectable average and still be missing from most of the searches that matter in its town, because absence is not a bad position, it is no position.

Why it moves when your site did not

Two forces push this number around without anyone touching a page, and both of them hit a local business harder than they hit a national one.

The first is location. Local results reorder themselves around where the searcher is standing, so one average is being computed over a customer three blocks from your shop and another one across the county line. Your position is a range, not a point, and the average hides the width of it. Devices and history feed in the same way. Phone results and desktop results are not the same list, and a searcher who has been to your site before may see you higher than a stranger would. All of it gets folded into the one figure.

The second is the mix of queries. Publish twenty new pages and they begin appearing for searches you never ranked for at all, most of them far down the list to start with. The average sinks while everything you care about holds. The same thing runs in reverse when a weak page falls out of the index and your average improves for no good reason at all.

The useful move is to stop watching the site-wide figure and start watching position for the handful of queries that actually pay you, which is the level our SEO work is managed at.

The numbers that give position its meaning

A ranking spot says nothing about whether anyone clicked. Read it beside the click-through rate for the same query: a page sitting in the top few spots that nobody clicks usually has a title and description problem rather than a ranking problem. And if you serve a local area, remember the local pack is ranked by its own set of signals, so a healthy average in the standard results can sit right alongside being invisible on the map.

The other habit worth keeping is checking impressions next to position. A page that climbed while its impressions collapsed is not winning. It is ranking better for a phrase that fewer people are bothering to ask. Position tells you where you stood. Impressions tell you whether anybody was standing there with you.