Top search queries

The Top search queries page provides information about search queries that have returned pages from your site. Try to make sure that your site provides content that is relevant to these searches, so that users find your site valuable and link to it.

Stats provide aggregate information. Your logs may show a particular query as having a higher rank for a certain day or period. If that query continues to be a top referrer, it will move to the top of our aggregate results and be listed. Also, our stats only show search queries from Google. Your log files may combine search results from all search engines.

Each table contains the following columns:

• #: The ranking of the search query.
• %: The percentage of the top 100 queries represented by each query. For example, if the top 100 queries represent 1,000 user searches, and those users searched for cheeseburger recipe 270 times, that query would represent 27% of the total number of searches for the top 100 queries.
• Query: The search terms used.
• Position: The highest position any page from your site ranked for that query, averaged over the last week. Since our index is dynamic, this may not be the same as the current position of your site for this query.

For detailed information about our search query syntax, see the Google Web API reference.

Stats that may be available are:

• Impressions: The top Google searches in which your site appeared, along with your site's average ranking in those search results.
• Clickthrough: The top Google searches from which users clicked through to your site.

This data can provide valuable information about your site. We recommend the following steps:

• Review the Impressions list for expected keywords. If keywords you expect to see don't appear, your site may not have enough useful content relevant to those keywords.
• Compare Impressions and Clickthrough to identify how you can improve your content. There are several steps you can take to make your content appear more compelling so that users click your site in search results pages. Your page title appears in the results, so make sure it's relevant and accurate. Google can display the text in your pages' meta descriptions in search results, so review your meta descriptions.
• If you have an AdWords account, review the Impressions list for keyword ideas.

Note

The data we display may differ from the data displayed in other tools, such as Google Analytics. Possible reasons for this include:

• We may not have crawled your site since the changes were last made.
• Webmaster Tools does some additional data processing—for example, to eliminate duplicates and visits from robots—that may cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources.
• Some tools, such as Google Analytics, track traffic only from users who have enabled JavaScript in their browser.