Google Search Console (GSC) is a treasure trove for SEO specialists, offering powerful insights into website performance, search visibility, and technical health. While most of us use GSC for tracking basic metrics like clicks, impressions, and keyword rankings, there are several lesser-known metrics that can give you an edge in your SEO strategy. These metrics go beyond the surface and offer actionable insights to drive more traffic and enhance the performance of your pages.
In this article, we will uncover three useful and relatively unknown metrics that you can extract from your Google Search Console data, allowing you to optimize your site more effectively. You can combine an extract these metrics using Google Data Studio.
Contents
Lost Clicks – Recovering Your Missed Traffic Potential
Lost Clicks is a highly actionable metric that can be easily derived from your Google Search Console data. It helps you quantify the number of clicks you are missing out on for specific queries or pages that are ranking but not generating the expected traffic.
Formula:
In this formula, 0.2 represents an estimated 20% Click-Through Rate (CTR) for top-ranking positions in your niche. You can adjust this CTR based on industry benchmarks.
How to Use Lost Clicks:
Identify Underperforming Keywords: Focus on keywords with high impressions but low click-through rates (CTR). This highlights opportunities where you have strong visibility but are not fully capturing traffic.
Optimize Page Titles and Descriptions: Use this data to improve how your page appears in search results, optimizing meta titles, descriptions, and structured data to attract more clicks.
Capture Missed Traffic: By recovering these lost clicks, you can quickly increase traffic without needing to improve your ranking position.
Why It Matters:
Lost clicks reveal the gap between visibility and actual engagement, showing where you’re not fully leveraging your rankings. Recovering these clicks offers immediate benefits to your SEO efforts without requiring an increase in search rankings.
Average Ideal Final Result (IFR) – Measuring How Close You Are to Perfect Performance
Average Ideal Final Result (Average IFR) is a lesser-known metric that allows you to measure how close your keywords or pages are to achieving their ideal performance in search rankings. This KPI is useful for understanding whether you’re maximizing the visibility for queries you’re already ranking for.
Formula:
The result is a percentage from 0% to 100%, showing how close you are to an “ideal” ranking. The closer the value is to 100%, the less room there is to gain in terms of visibility.
How to Use Average IFR:
Track Performance of Well-Ranking Keywords: Use this metric to identify which pages or keywords are performing well but still have room for growth.
Prioritize Pages for Optimization: If a keyword is ranking at the top of the SERPs but has a low IFR, there’s still room to improve content and attract more clicks or better align with user intent.
Benchmark Success: Average IFR is useful for setting realistic optimization goals. A 100% IFR means you’re fully capturing the potential for a specific query, while lower IFR scores suggest room for improvement.
Why It Matters:
Average IFR helps you focus on extracting the maximum visibility from your existing rankings. It’s a clear way to measure if you are truly dominating the search space for the queries you care about, or if there’s still room to grow.
Potential Rank – Estimating Your Ranking Ceiling
Potential Rank is another underrated metric that can provide insights into where your rankings could potentially land with the right optimization efforts. While Google Search Console provides your current average ranking position, Potential Rank estimates the highest rank your page could achieve based on its current visibility and competition.
Formula:
How to Calculate Potential Rank:
Analyze Keyword Competition and Traffic Data: You can estimate your Potential Rank by analyzing the competitiveness of the keyword, backlink strength, and the current ranking distribution across competitors.
Use CTR Benchmarks to Calculate Traffic Potential: Calculate how much traffic you’re missing compared to the expected CTR for top positions and adjust accordingly.
Consider that an average CTR for the keywords in the first positions is 0.2/0.3 (or 20%/30%) depending on the sector.
How to Use Potential Rank:
Set Realistic Ranking Goals: Potential Rank allows you to understand where your page or keyword could realistically rank with improvements in content quality, backlinks, and other SEO factors.
Focus on High-Gain Opportunities: Prioritize pages or keywords where the gap between your current rank and potential rank is significant, meaning there’s room for growth.
Track the Impact of SEO Changes: As you optimize your pages, monitor how close you are to your potential rank to ensure your changes are making a tangible impact.
Why It Matters:
Potential Rank is a forward-looking metric that helps you estimate the upside of your SEO efforts. It’s particularly useful for identifying which pages or keywords are worth investing in for long-term growth.
Final Thoughts
While many SEO specialists focus on surface-level metrics like impressions, clicks, and average ranking, these three lesser-known metrics—Lost Clicks, Average Ideal Final Result (IFR), and Potential Rank—offer deeper insights that can drive more effective optimization.
Here’s how you can put these metrics into action:
Lost Clicks:
Example Action: If you see a high volume of impressions but low CTR on a keyword like “legal software solutions,” it’s a clear signal to optimize your meta titles and descriptions. Test different versions to create more enticing, clickable content. For instance, adding value propositions like “Save 30% on Legal Software” or urgency like “Limited-Time Offer” can increase your CTR.
Optimization Idea: If you’re ranking in the 3rd position but your Lost Clicks metric shows a significant gap, aim to close this by enhancing your search snippet. Add structured data to get a rich result (FAQ or review stars), making your listing stand out visually.
Average IFR:
Example Action: Let’s say your keyword “CRM for small businesses” has an IFR of 75%. This means your page is performing well but not fully optimized. Focus on fine-tuning your content, improving internal linking, or enhancing on-page SEO to push your IFR closer to 100%.
Optimization Idea: Consider creating FAQ sections or updating the content to cover subtopics related to the keyword, such as “best CRM for small startups” or “CRM pricing models.” This could help close the gap and ensure you’re addressing search intent fully.
Potential Rank:
Example Action: If the Potential Rank metric suggests you could move from position 5 to 2 for a keyword like “cloud-based accounting tools,” prioritize building backlinks to this page and improving content depth to meet user intent better.
Optimization Idea: Analyze your competitors ranking above you and identify gaps in their content that you can fill. For example, if their page lacks user reviews, consider adding case studies, testimonials, or videos to strengthen your content and increase its rank.
By regularly monitoring these metrics and taking targeted actions, you can significantly improve your pages’ performance. The key is to leverage these insights for quick wins (like optimizing Lost Clicks) and long-term growth (like improving your Potential Rank) to create a well-rounded SEO strategy.
