Impressions
Every time your page is shown in a result set, whether or not anyone clicks.
Analogy Mental model
How often passers-by glance up at your sign. Most keep walking, but the count still tells you the street has foot traffic.
In practice What you actually do
For a new site, watch impressions before clicks. A rising impression curve with flat clicks usually means the engine is testing you against new long-tail queries, which is a good sign that the content is being understood.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
High impressions with almost no clicks is either a snippet problem or a page-two problem. Both are diagnosable: check average position first, then ask whether your description gives anyone a reason to choose you over the nine results around it.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →