Contents
- The first split to make is brand versus non-brand: brand traffic inflates every average and measures no SEO work at all.
- Queries sitting between position five and fifteen are where moderate effort produces the most effect.
- Average position is weighted by impressions: it degrades mechanically as visibility widens, without anything getting worse.
Why the raw report is useless
Opening the Performance report and sorting by clicks always gives the same result: the brand name at the top, then a long tail of near-identical phrasings. You get satisfaction out of it and no decision.
The report does contain enough to decide on, provided you sort it. Three passes are enough.
Pass 1: take out the brand
Filter the queries containing the brand name and its common misspellings, then look at the two sets separately.
Brand traffic measures awareness, not search performance. It has a very high CTR and a position close to 1, which pulls every average up and hides the real state of everything else. An agency presenting an average CTR of 12% without having made that split is presenting nothing.
Non-brand is what SEO work acts on. It is the only scope worth commenting on in a review.
Pass 2: spot positions 5 to 15
Within non-brand, filter the queries whose average position sits between 5 and 15, sorted by descending impressions.
This band is the most profitable. Above fifth place, gaining a rank takes a great deal for very little. Below fifteenth, the page is too far out for an adjustment to be enough. Between the two, a page already exists, Google judges it relevant, and often very little is missing: a title picking up the exact phrasing, a missing section, an absent internal link.
Impression volume sets the priority. One query in twelfth position with 4,000 monthly impressions beats three queries in sixth position at 80 impressions.
Pass 3: click-through rate gaps
Compare each query's observed CTR to what is generally expected at that position. A page in third place with an abnormally low CTR signals a problem that has nothing to do with ranking: an unappealing title, a missing description, or a competitor's rich result capturing the attention.
It is the most profitable kind of fix there is, because it needs neither content nor links: only a rewritten tag.
What to do next
Those three passes produce three action lists, in this order of priority.
Titles and descriptions to rewrite, immediate and risk-free. Pages to expand, when a query in position 8 to 15 covers an aspect the page handles in a single sentence. Pages to create, when a query brings impressions with no page genuinely matching it.
This sort is redone every month. It takes half an hour once you have done it once, and it is the best ratio of time spent to traffic gained. It is also exactly the kind of question you put straight to Adwise once Search Console is connected, without going back through the interface filters.
Frequently asked questions
The Adwise team connects Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, GA4 and Search Console so agencies and freelancers can run their campaigns from a single place.