An Impression is used to quantify the number of digital views of your website in search engine results pages.

It’s also used in other marketing practices such as Paid Search and Display Advertising. In these cases its related to when you advert has been viewed.

In SEO, you’ll find clicks reported in Google Search  Console. 

This quantifies the number of people who have clicked on your website from search results pages.

This is not to be confused with views or sessions which are different metrics entirely.

CTR is short for Click Through Rate. 

CTR is the ratio of clicks over impressions. 

Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR

If you had 1000 impressions and 50 clicks, then your CTR rate would be 5%.

In SEO the position you appear in search results greatly impacts your CTR, websites positioned high up in search results will attract a higher CTR than websites listed at the bottom.

CTR is used across SEO, Paid, Display Advertising.

A High CTR is a good indication that users find your ads or search listings helpful and relevant. 

Average Position is used in Google Search Console and Google Ads.

Average Position is calculated based on the rank (or position) of your site.

An Average Position of 1, would indicate you are ranked in 1st position on Page 1 of Google.

An Average Position of 1.5 would indicate that your site ranks between 1st and 2nd position on Page 1 of Google.

An Average Position of 11 would indicate that your site ranks 11th, i.e. top of Page 2 in Google.

Ranking Terms is measured as the quantity of unique search terms that you website ranks for.

SEO Tools like Ahrefs use this metric and its useful to understand how many unique search terms a website ranks for.

However, its important to note that ranking terms doesn’t account for the position. If you have 1000 ranking terms, but the average position of those ranking terms is on Page 10 of Google, then that isn’t going to drive much traffic vs 10 ranking terms on Page 1 of Google.

Ranking Terms is useful to measure alongside a content strategy as naturally as you create more unique content, your website will increase its visibility on ranking terms.

Search Visibility is a metric used by Ranking Tools.

Ranking Tools measure the performance of your website on a group of terms that you set.

For example you may have hand-picked one hundred important search terms and want to measure how well your site ranks on those terms.

Using a Ranking Tracking Tool like Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs, SEMRush (to name a view) all utlisie a visibility metric.

Essentially if you were to be in 1st position on every term that you are tracking, then your search visibility score would be 100%.

Each tool (Ahrefs, Semrush, Advanced Web Ranking) use different formulas to calculate their percentages, but they are all based on teh same principle.

Search visibility is calculated on a number of factors including:

• Number of keywords you rank for
• The positions you hold for the keywords
• The search volume for each of the keywords
• Click through rate on each of the keywords
• The authority you hold on both domain and page

Please note that search visibility is calculated slightly different depending on the SEO reporting tool you use. This is why comparing data from one tool with another isn’t advised as it’s not an apples-for-apples comparison.

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It’s recommended to improve your SEO search visibility, work on building your authority as well as creating well-written content with a keyword strategy in place.

A good mixture of links and optimised high-quality content is a sure way to increase visibility.

Featured snippets appear at the top of Google Search Results.

They are also known as Position 0 results.

Featured Snippets are highlighted snippets of content to provide users a quick answer to their search query.

These FAQ questions are examples of questions asked by users and may appear in Google Search Results as Featured Snippets!

Site links are groups of links that appear under the first or second result in Google.

Site links typically appear for brand name searches and provide users with easy access to deeper pages on a website.

For example if you searched for “Amazon” in Google, you’d be presented with Amazon website and a sub listing featuring site links for Prime Video, Books, Wish List etc.

Site links are based on what pages users visit subsequently when arriving on a homepage.

You can’t opt in for Site links, you can only opt out.

Image packs are when a search query results in a set of horizontal images.

For example searching for “Lion Desktop Wallpaper” on Google, I’m presented with a list of websites and thumbnails of images I can find from each site.

Image Packs can appear in any organic position and is based on the search query.