Has anyone noticed this? impressions go down when position improves.

[JrussellDAS]

I guess I'm just noticing this, but it seems as position improves impressions decrease and vice versa. Keeping clicks fairly consistent. I'm surprised by this. I just joined this company with a lot of small business locations and getting myself acquainted with all the accounts to understand what to tackle first for improving the Organic and Local SEO/listings. I looked at the other 11 GSC accounts and they have similarities. This one is the most obvious.

Have you all noticed this, and how do you work to improve results when Google drops impressions as you do?

 

[Yan Gilbert]

This is normal behavior. For example, there may be many keywords that are irrelevant but you are still ranking poorly for. Then the algo adjusts and you are no longer ranking at all for some of those, lowering impressions and improving average rankings for the remaining keywords.

 

[Conor Treacy]

As Yan said, it's normal when you're just looking at the overview chart and every potential keyword for that particular page.With that said, there are times where you don't want to be #1, and a #2 or #3 gets more clicks. This can happen depdnign on the number of ads being displayed and if people do a quick scroll past the ads and sometimes the next organic position gets lost in the shuffle too.

We've seen that scenario with one of our clients in the House Cleaning industry. Depending on the target keywords, they get more clicks in #2 and #3 than they do in #1.

 

[Joey Abna]

You really have to spend some time parsing out the numbers in GSC looking at them in different ways. Compare them from the time where you see a change to the previous period of the same length. When you do this look at the pages and the queries. I once had a client call me freaking out because they noticed their avg search position fell 2 spots. When I dug into GSC I found a huge temporary increase for a random search query with lots of volume and a terrible ranking. Another thing to look for are new queries you are ranking for now and queries you don't rank for anymore as those can make the charts scratch your head and wonder what the heck is going on.

 

[JrussellDAS]

I'm working on exporting history in GSC for the last 16 months and I'm reminded of when I posted this. Thank you for the responses, btw. It still seems so strange to me that the lines for position and impressions reflect each other like an ink blot. One goes up the other down and vice versa, so consistently. Like it's built into Google's algorithm, but I hear what you all are saying.