Search Console tells you your average position is 8.4. Someone in Alfredton sees you third. Someone in Sebastopol does not see you at all. The average is the one number in the report that describes nobody in particular, and for a business that works in one region it is close to useless.
Why the number is built that way
Search Console is free, it is honest about its own data, and it is the first place anyone should look. But its position figure is an average across every impression it recorded, and its only geographic dimension is country. You can filter to Australia. You cannot filter to Ballarat, let alone to a suburb.
That is fine for a national retailer. For a trade working a thirty-kilometre radius it hides the only thing worth knowing. Local results move by a few streets. Google weighs where the searcher is standing, and it weighs it heavily, so a single business can genuinely sit at three in one suburb and off the first page in the next one over. Averaging those together produces a number that is arithmetically correct and practically meaningless.
It gets worse when things improve. Win the map pack in the suburb where most of your customers are and your average position can go down, because you are now showing up for a pile of low-intent searches further out that you never appeared in before. The report looks like a decline. The phone says otherwise.
So we stopped using it as the headline
Insights now runs the actual search from a named suburb and records what comes back: your position, who is above you and whether the map pack is showing at all. Not an average. The result page as a person standing in that suburb would see it.
The mechanics are unglamorous. A SERP data provider will run a query against a specific location code and hand back the ranked results, and a check twenty results deep costs a fraction of a cent. That is the whole trick. It is not clever and it is not expensive; it is just something Search Console structurally cannot do, so it needed a different source.
The part that took the longest was not the lookup. It was letting someone type “Wendouree” instead of hunting through a list of several thousand location codes to find the right one. Nobody thinks of where they work as an identifier.
The useful half is not your own position
Knowing you are eighth is mildly interesting. Knowing who the seven are is a work plan.
Pull the same query from four suburbs you actually serve and the competitor set usually is not the same four businesses. One will be strong everywhere, which tells you something about their profile and their reviews. Two will be strong only near their own address, which tells you their reach is proximity and not much else. And there is frequently a suburb where the results are weak all round — nobody has bothered writing a real page for it — which is the cheapest work available to you that month.
You cannot see any of that in an average. You can see it in about ten minutes with per-suburb results in front of you, and it turns “do some SEO” into a specific list of things to go and do.
Also worth checking: whether the map pack is even there
For a lot of local searches the three-result map block takes the attention and the clicks, and the ordinary blue links below it matter much less than they used to. For other searches it does not appear at all.
Which of those applies to your main search term decides where the work goes. If the map pack shows, your Google Business Profile is the lever and the website supports it. If it does not, the page itself is back to carrying the load. Same business, same term, different job depending on what Google decides to render — and that is a thing you have to look at rather than assume.
The boring thing that undoes all of it
None of this survives a site that stops working. An SSL certificate quietly expiring, a host slowing to a crawl, a plugin update taking a page down — any of it will undo a quarter of patient search work, and the pattern is always the same: nobody notices for days, because the owner is not sitting there refreshing their own website.
That is why we watch the site as well as the rankings. Not a sales pitch so much as an admission that the failure mode is real and completely silent. What is actually worth monitoring →
What rank tracking still will not tell you
Being straight about the limits, because the industry mostly is not:
- A rank check is a snapshot, not the truth. Results move about during a day and are personalised by history and device. Watch the trend over weeks; do not read anything into a single check.
- Position is not revenue. Ranking first for something nobody searches, or for a term that brings tyre-kickers, is a number going up and a business standing still.
- Checking daily is a waste of money and attention. Weekly or fortnightly shows you the same trend and costs a fraction as much.
- It measures the outcome, not the cause. It tells you something moved. Working out why is still a person's job.
If you only do one thing
Pick your single most valuable search term — the one a customer types when they are ready to ring someone — and find out where you actually sit for it in the three or four suburbs you most want work from. Not the national average. The real positions.
You will usually discover you are doing better than you thought in one place and worse than you thought in another, and the gap between those two is where the next month of work lives. That measurement is part of every SEO engagement we run, because starting anywhere else is guessing.
Want to know where you actually rank in the suburbs you work in?
How our SEO works →