Two positions, two instruments

There are two kinds of position on this product’s screens, and they are not the same measurement. One is a search-results check Rankgap runs for a keyword you asked it to watch. The other is the average position Google Search Console reports for a query, which is weighted by how often each result was shown.

Why they disagree

• A tracked check asks about one keyword, in one market, on one device, at one moment. Search Console reports what it recorded for your property’s web results over a day, and Rankgap asks for that without narrowing it by device or by country.
• Search Console knows only the queries you were shown for. A keyword you rank nowhere for has no row there at all, which is a different fact from a check that looked and found nothing.
• A tracked check is this product paying to look, on a cadence you chose by tracking the keyword. Search Console is Google reporting what already happened, for free, with its own lag.

So the two can be far apart on the same keyword in the same week, and neither of them is broken. They answer different questions.

Which is why they sit side by side rather than in one line

Blending two instruments into one series is the kind of chart that looks more confident than its data. A reader cannot see that half the line came from somewhere else, and nothing on the screen would tell them. So the Position tracking screen names each column’s source in the column’s own heading, and the Dashboard draws clicks and the visibility estimate as two charts stacked on one timeline rather than as one chart with two scales.

And why Search Console’s position is not a series you can chart

The Search Console screen charts clicks, impressions and click-through rate. Position is deliberately not the fourth, and the reason is not tidiness. A day with impressions and no clicks has an honest click-through rate of zero, and a day with no impressions at all has no rate — so the line can leave that day out and break there, which is something a rate can do without lying.

A position has no value to leave out. There is no position to report for a day you were shown to nobody, and a series drawn the same way would be mostly holes. The honest version is the tile above the chart, which prints the window’s own figure and says what it is an average of.

What to do with the pair

To know whether a page moved

Read the tracked check. It asks about one keyword, in one market, on one device, at one moment, so a change in it is a change in that one reading and in nothing else.

To know whether the movement was worth anything

Read Search Console. Impressions and clicks are the half a position cannot tell you: a keyword can climb and earn nothing, and a keyword can sit exactly where it was while the result page around it changes and the clicks move.

When the two disagree sharply

A common reason is that you rank differently in the places and on the devices your readers actually search from. The tracked check asks about one of each; Search Console reports all of them together, because Rankgap asks it for the property without narrowing by device or by country. That is a finding rather than an error.