Last Updated on April 14, 2022 by Scott Charleboix

In this post, how you can use search impression data I’m going to show you in this post how you can use the search impression data (from your WordPress dashboard) to grow shares for your Pinterest pins, bring more traffic to your blog, and promote your blog’s content via using your  search impression stats. 

When I first noticed the word search impressions in my WordPress Dashboard, I sent this question to the Rank Math Facebook Group: 

My question to Rank Math:  I have a general question concerning SEO. I saw something called “Search Impressions” in the field called SEO details that I hadn’t noticed before. Is that something new that is a part of Rank Math? I’d like to find out more information on how I can use that information to my benefit.

I’ve noticed that some of my posts have a large number of search impressions but there’s not a direct correlation to having a large number of social shares for items showing high results. I’d like to bring that disparity closer together so please provide me with a link to a post that I think might be part of your program. Thank You. Scott | PinArtwork SEO

Rank Math’s response:  “Hello, Thank you so much for getting in touch.  The Search Impressions metric shows the number of times your page has been displayed to users on Google.  That metric comes from Google Search Console.”

What are impressions in the Google Search Console (GSC)?

Search Impressions are the number of times any URL from your site has appeared in search results viewed by a user.  In other words, it’s the number of times someone has seen your site in their search results.

Are impressions more important than clicks?

Impressions are required in order to generate a click, but not every person who views your SERP will click on it, therefore you’ll always have more search impressions than clicks.

Are Search Impressions important?

Yes, search impressions are important because they reflect how many times your content has been displayed.  What’s important for you to note is that the higher your impressions, the more timely and relevant your content is.  So posts that have a tendency to rank in the Top 3 SERPs will have a larger number of search impressions. 

This is a goal that you should strive to obtain a large number of search impressions for your posts.  There’s probably a correlation between the number of search impressions and posts that rank in the Top 3 SERPs but this post isn’t going to look into that detail. 

There was an article written by Tom Capper called:  ‘What are “Impressions” in Google Search Console?’ I’m bringing this to your attention because his point in the article is that he lays out five reasons why he thinks impressions ARE NOT a valid indicator of SEO success. 

I wish I could tell you exactly what I did to have this date populated into my WordPress Dashboard.  But I’m not entirely sure how it showed up.  To the best of my knowledge, it’s because of a recent change that Rank Math has done to their plug-in.  The best way for me to describe it is to guide you to their post called

As Tom Capper pointed out earlier the search impressions by themselves are not a guarantee and Google has a tendency these days to mark most of your posts as informational which unfortunately isn’t good thing because it doesn’t help your organic traffic. 

I’ve got a total of more than 400 blog posts which I’ve been writing for nearly two years.  As a reminder, content is great for your blog, so you need to take the necessary time to step away from writing for your blog and now and then promote the content of your blog.  Which is the aim of this post to provide you with what I’m doing on my blog and hopefully you’ll be able to do it as well. 

The thing with the search impressions is that they don’t indicate if they’re resulting in clicks to your site.  All they are is a sign that your post has appeared in Google results.  Utilizing this method probably won’t increase your rankings but it can increase your Pinterest social shares which in the long run you’re wanting people to come to your site.

How you can use Search Impression data

This is a helpful way to identify where you should place your emphasis to promote your blog posts.  One of my previous posts discussed How to create a Keyword Map for SEO.  That’s a long drawn out way to guess estimate where your visitors might be leading and to me the search impressions seems like a better way to identify your time and resources as to where you should promote various posts. 

This method doesn’t take rank tracking into consideration.  It merely looks at the numbers of search impressions and I randomly selected all of my posts that had a number that I pulled out of the air (100) to indicate which posts I’d like to promote making new Pinterest pins for. 

You can call the category anything you like (but I forgot that the category you create will show up in your blog’s post so don’t get too carried away). 

For my category I decided to call it +PromotePins to indicate to me where I want to promote certain pins.

The reason for doing this is so that we can use WordPress to our advantage and filter out the posts that have the category that you selected (+PromotePins or whatever you called it) so you can pull those out easily to start making new pins. 

If you click on my category called +PromotePins you’ll be able to see the posts that I’ve identified as having more than 100 Search Impressions. 

Utilizing your Rank Math SEO plug-in you’ll be able to know how many people saw your post for keywords that you’ve mentioned within the post by looking at the number of search impressions. 

It’s anybody’s guess exactly how the Google Algorithm works and what kind of data that it’s looking to

pull when it indexes your site.  We do know that the Algorithm uses more than 200 factors.  In addition, Moz uses 40 factors to look at your Domain Authority (DA) score. 

General Info about Search Impressions:

When your results show up in a Google search they count as a search impression.  Use these search impressions to your advantage.  Use them as an early indication that you’re doing a good job for your SEO campaign and that it’s performing well (or not). 

A thing that you need to know is that as you start to creep more and more of your keywords into the Top 3 search results your traffic will begin to increase.  Thus, as your rankings improve, the number of your search impressions will increase as well. 

What you have to keep in mind is that the search impressions necessarily may not result in clicks.  But when you start to see an increase in the number of social shares on Pinterest that is an indication that people liked your Pinterest pin which might result in more traffic coming to your website. 

The good news is that search impressions are an indicator that your keywords did show up in a SERP so they do deserve a little bit of your attention. 

As rankings improve, impressions will increase. Then, when you break into the top 3, your traffic will begin to surge.

You can easily track impressions through Google Search Console’s “Performance” module.

To be clear, impressions are not the same as clicks. Many would call them vanity metrics because they don’t drive traffic or revenue. Impressions are purely a record of how many times a particular page from your site appeared in the SERP.

The SEO metric data from Rank Math is pulled from the Google Search Console and shows up in the SEO field. 

Here’s a random snapshot to show you what to look for in the SEO Field to show your # of Search Impressions.

The information above is the data from my post called How to Make a Good SEO Report and the number of Search Impressions for this particular post was 17,442 Search Impressions as you can see from the close-up. 

For the time being, I want to keep an eye and track 10 random posts that appeared in this order when I clicked on the +PromotePins category.   In addition, so that I have something to compare for down the road, I’m providing the following information for these posts:  1)  Search Impressions and 2) Social Shares at the end of the description for the post.  These numbers are the numbers showing as of 4/14/2022. 

I plan to update this post in approximately a month. That’ll give me time to promote the various posts and make new Pinterest pins. All in all, I’ve got 72 posts with more than 100 Search Impressions. So it’ll probably be closer to the first part or middle of June so that I’d have time to create all of the new pins and promote them on Pinterest.

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Conclusion

Time will tell if this method works or not, but I believe that it will because search impressions are an indicator that you’re taking the right steps to get noticed. I challenge you to identify at least 10 of your popular posts that have a large number of search impressions and make new pins for those posts and then follow-up on those posts like I plan to in a month or so to see how they’ve grown.