Here's a conversation we have almost every week. Someone Googles one phrase — the exact thing they think their customers type — sees they're not sitting at number one, and the heart sinks. "I thought our SEO was working. We're not even on the first page for this."
We get it. It feels like the obvious test. You search the main thing you sell plus your town, and if you're not top of Google, the SEO must be failing. Simple.
Except that's not how SEO works, and judging it that way is a bit like judging your whole month's takings by looking at one customer's invoice. It tells you almost nothing, and it'll have you worrying about the wrong things. So let's go through how SEO is actually measured, why "we're not number one" is the wrong question, and what the numbers that genuinely matter look like — using real Search Console data from sites we manage.
You don't rank for one keyword. You rank for hundreds.
This is the bit nearly everyone misses. Your website isn't trying to rank for the one phrase in your head. It's ranking for everything people type that's even loosely related to what you do.
A single website might show up in Google for your main service, your service plus your town, "how much does [your service] cost", "[your service] near me", "best [your service] in [your area]", "[your service] reviews", and a few hundred more variations besides. Some of those you'll rank top three for. Some you'll be on page two for. Some you'll be sitting at position fifty for, and you'd never know unless you went looking.
To give you a real example, here's one of the Search Console accounts we manage. Over the last three months Google recorded this site appearing for 150 different search terms — and its positions across them range from number one all the way down to ninety-eighth. First for some, buried for others, and everything in between. That's completely normal. That's what every real SEO campaign looks like under the bonnet.
So when someone asks "are we ranking?", there isn't a single answer. You're ranking brilliantly for some things and not at all for others, all at the same time.
Why your "average position" looks worse than it is
Google Search Console will show you an average position across all your keywords, and this number trips people up constantly.
On that same site, the average position over the last three months is 20.8. At a glance that sounds rubbish — page two-ish. But it's an average, and averages lie when the spread is wide. The site is first for several terms and sitting around fiftieth for some competitive ones it's only recently started chasing. Throw those into a blender and the average lands at 20.8, even though the reality is "winning some, building others".
It's like working out the average age of a room with a newborn and a pensioner in it and concluding everyone's middle-aged. The average is technically true and tells you nothing useful on its own.
This is exactly why a brand-new keyword you've started targeting can drag your average down even when everything is going right. You start ranking for ten new competitive terms, you enter them all at position sixty, and your tidy average gets worse — because you're now visible for things you weren't visible for at all before. That's progress showing up as a worse-looking number. Wild, but true.
Real Search Console data from a site we manage. That "20.8" average position is a blend of keywords ranking anywhere from #1 to #98, which is why no single number tells the whole story.
Rankings move every single day
Even for one keyword, there is no fixed "position". Google re-shuffles results constantly based on who's searching, where they are, what device they're on, what they searched a minute ago, and a thousand other signals.
You can be third in the morning and seventh by the afternoon for the exact same phrase, without anything on your site changing. Search from your office and from home and you'll often get different results. So if you check one keyword on a Tuesday, panic, and check again Friday to find you've "dropped", you haven't necessarily done anything wrong — that's just the daily weather of search.
You can see the same thing in daily traffic. Here's the overview from another site we manage — look at how the clicks jump around day to day, quiet stretches then sudden spikes. None of that is the site getting "better" or "worse" overnight. It's normal noise.
Another site we manage. Up top, daily clicks bounce around constantly. Ignore any single day. Underneath, the number of pages Google has indexed climbs steadily to 27: the site getting healthier where it counts.
This is the single biggest reason not to measure SEO by spot-checking one phrase. You're taking one reading, of one keyword, on one day, on one device. It's noise.
So how do you measure SEO properly?
You stop looking at individual rankings and you look at the two numbers that actually tell the story, both inside Google Search Console: impressions and clicks.
Impressions = how many times your site showed up in Google's results. Every time someone searched something and your page appeared on the results page — whether they clicked or not — that's one impression. It's a direct measure of how visible you are across all those hundreds of keywords at once.
Clicks = how many of those people actually clicked through to your site from Google.
And here's the crucial part most people don't realise: these are organic numbers. Search Console only counts visits that came from someone typing a search into Google and clicking your result. It does not count people who came from your Instagram, from a link you sent in a text, from your email signature, or from typing your web address straight in. None of that. Every impression and click in here is a stranger who found you on Google because of your SEO. That's what makes it the honest scoreboard — it can't be padded out by your social media or by people who already knew you.
What you want to see is both of those lines climbing over months. More impressions means you're visible for more searches, and higher up, so more people are seeing you. More clicks means that visibility is turning into actual visitors. When impressions and clicks are trending up over time, your SEO is working. Full stop. That's the measurement, not where you sit for one phrase on one Tuesday.
What working SEO actually looks like over time
Here's the chart you really want to see, from one of the sites we manage. Forget any single day. Step back to the monthly view and you get the trend that matters: organic impressions and organic clicks both climbing, month after month.
A site we manage, viewed month by month. Impressions (purple) and clicks (blue) both heading steadily up and to the right. This is what working SEO looks like: not a single position, but a trend pointing the right way.
Notice we're not pointing at a ranking. We're pointing at the direction of travel. More and more people finding this business through Google search, every month, all from organic search. Not socials, not direct, not people who already knew them. That's the whole game, and it's the thing a one-off Google search can never show you.
Why isn't a new site just number one for everything?
Because two things decide where you land for any given search: how competitive that keyword is, and how much authority your site has earned.
Some searches are brutal. The most contested terms in your trade might be held by firms who've been trading twenty years, with hundreds of reviews and years of other websites linking to them. A six-month-old site doesn't leapfrog that overnight, and anyone who promises it will is selling you a fantasy. Other searches are far less contested, and a good new site can rank for those quickly.
Authority is the bit you build over time. It comes from having pages properly built around what people search, a well-optimised Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, and other reputable sites linking to you. The more of that you've earned, the higher you rank across the board — and the more of those competitive keywords start falling your way. It compounds. The work done in month one is still paying off in month twelve, and the gap between you and slower competitors widens the longer you keep at it.
The honest version of "are we ranking?"
So next time you're tempted to Google one phrase and judge everything by it, don't. Open Search Console instead and ask three better questions:
- Are my organic impressions going up over time? (Am I getting more visible?)
- Are my organic clicks going up over time? (Is that visibility bringing real visitors?)
- Is the trend over months pointing in the right direction? (Ignore any single day.)
If those are climbing, your SEO is doing its job, even if you're not number one for the one phrase that's stuck in your head. And honestly, you never will be number one for everything — nobody is. You'll be number one for some things, fighting for others, and quietly hoovering up traffic across hundreds of searches you've never even thought to check.
That's not a campaign falling short. That's exactly what good SEO looks like.
Want us to look at your actual numbers? We'll pull up your Search Console, show you what's really happening across all your keywords, and tell you straight where the opportunities are — on a quick, no-pressure call. Book a free call here.