If you’re signed into Google on an account which manages your company’s Google Search Console, you might have noticed that if you make a search which also happens to be important for your business, you get a notice at the top of the search results. This says something like: “See how your site has been showing for this query for the past 90 days and compare to the previous 90 days”, and shows you the clicks, impressions and search position you’ve been getting, and how it compares to the previous quarter. It’s making a lot more people aware of how their site is doing in search.
The data refers to all searches worldwide, which may not be relevant to your business; the figures might be skewed by a rise or fall in Tuvalu or somewhere. So what you’ll want to do is to click through to Google Search Console and set the filter to wherever you’re commercially interested.
How to see changed position rankings on Google Search Console
- To set up comparative results, go to the ‘Performance’ report in Google Search Console. You’ll probably see a report on ‘Queries’ with ‘Search Type’ set as ‘Web’ and date as ‘Last 3 months’.
- Click on the date filter and select ‘Compare’, then the period you want (e.g. ‘Compare last 3 months to previous period’).
- Click on +NEW and select the country you want (unless you really are interested in the whole world).
- Click on ‘Average Position’ if it’s greyed out, and (if you want) ‘Average CTR’ too.
- You’ll probably want to show more results. If you want to examine changes, ‘Export Data’ (the down arrow icon) and investigate the data in a spreadsheet.