Reading the Position tracking screen

Position tracking is the tracker’s own screen: a distribution of where your tracked keywords sit, a chart against the rivals you track, and a table with a row per keyword.

Seven bands, and why two of them are not positions

The distribution has 7 buckets: five ranked bands, plus two facts a position cannot state on its own — checked and found nowhere in the results we read, and not yet checked at all. Five bands alone would quietly claim that every keyword you track ranks somewhere, and those last two are different answers rather than a smaller version of the same one.

The five ranked labels are ranges rather than tops, because these buckets partition: a label reading “top twenty” over a bucket that excludes the top ten says the opposite of what it means.

A bucket delta has no good direction

A change beside a bucket count is drawn without a colour, because the screen cannot tell which way it went: two fewer keywords in the fifty-first-to-hundredth band is good news if those two moved up and bad news if they left the results entirely. A change beside one keyword’s own position does take a colour, because that is two dated readings of one thing, and there an upward arrow means a smaller number.

Three instruments, three columns, never one

• Average position is this product’s own weekly check.
• Volume is the monthly searches an advertising provider reports for that phrase in this project’s market, refreshed about once a month.
• Clicks is Google Search Console’s own count over a recent window.

Each column names its source in its heading, and a position from a weekly check never shares a column or a chart with an impression-weighted average from Search Console. A keyword with nothing stored in one of those columns reads as a dash; a bucket with nothing in it reads as a real zero.

One device and one market

This screen shows one device at a time, and only checks taken in the project’s current market. It is the one screen that filters on the market a check was asked in — Home, the Dashboard, the share of voice on Domain overview’s Competitors tab and the weekly summary all blend every market a check was taken in, which is worth knowing if you have moved a project between countries. The footnote on the screen says both halves, and names the date of the first check it can see in the current market.

Result page blocks are presence and nothing else

The chips in the features column say the result page carried that kind of block. They say nothing about who owns it, because ownership is not measured. Mobile and desktop genuinely carry different blocks, so the chips differ between the two views of one keyword.