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Performance

Top Queries

Top Queries is the canonical "what is my site ranking for?" report. It aggregates every search query that produced an impression in your selected window, sorted by clicks. This is the surface you bring up when you need to answer commercial questions: which keywords drive my traffic, which terms are saturated, which deserve a content investment, and which are surprising.

What it measures

  • Query — the exact (lowercased, anonymised by Google) search string.
  • Clicks / Impressions / CTR / Avg. position — totals across the date range. CTR is calculated as clicks / impressions across the period; position is impression-weighted.

How we compute it

  1. We pull every query that produced an impression for your site over the selected window, web search only.
  2. Rows are grouped by the exact query string, summing clicks and impressions and computing the impression-weighted average position.
  3. Google's anonymised long-tail bucket (the empty-query row) is dropped, and the table is ordered descending by clicks.
  4. The Overview Dashboard preview shows the top 5–10; the full report exposes every query that cleared at least one impression.

Scenarios you'll see

Branded query at #1

High clicks, very high CTR, position ~1. This is your name being searched directly. Useful for monitoring brand health, but treat it separately from acquisition queries — it's demand you already have.

Money keyword on page one

A non-brand commercial term ranking 1–10 with meaningful impressions and CTR ≥ the SERP average for that bucket. Defend it: monitor weekly, keep the ranking page fresh, and watch for cannibalisation.

High impressions, low CTR

Lots of visibility but few clicks. Either you're at position 4–10 (visible but losing the click), the title/description doesn't match intent, or a SERP feature is stealing the click. Send this query to CTR Opportunities.

Striking-distance query

Position 11–20 with non-trivial impressions. The fastest ROI in SEO: small ranking gain → big click gain. Open Striking Distance for the curated list.

Long question phrase

A natural-language query starting with how/what/why. High intent and often answered by a featured snippet. Match it to a single canonical page in your content library.

Off-topic surprise

A query you don't sell against but rank for. Could be a content gap (write the article), an irrelevant page (de-optimise to free up crawl budget), or a misfire from an outdated page Google is still surfacing.

What to do with it

  • Sort by impressions instead of clicks to find demand you're failing to convert.
  • Filter the table by your Query Groups to look at brand vs non-brand, commercial vs informational, etc.
  • Pair with Cannibalization to find queries where multiple pages compete and pick a canonical winner.
  • Tag interesting queries via Saved Views so the team can revisit the same slice next week.

Caveats & limits

  • Google omits queries deemed personally identifiable or below a privacy threshold. The sum of query-level clicks will not equal the site-level total in Traffic Trend — the gap is the anonymised long tail.
  • Position is impression-weighted; a query with one impression at position 1 and one impression at position 100 averages to 50.5, not 1.
  • Date-range comparisons treat the query as a single string — "best laptop" and "best laptops" are different rows.

Related reports