This screenshot says it all. It’s the Google Search Console graph for the average position this year.
Average CTR 2018:
Average Position 2018:
Total Clicks 2018:
Total Impressions 2018:
Combined:
Some fluctuation in position is absolutely normal.
What does seem odd though is the apparent regular but not precisely regular frequency of the dips. Is there a pattern to them, such as they are at weekneds or something?
I generally see this kind of dip and recover when there has been some major alteration to a site.
But one thing worth noting is a corrolation between the dips postion and peaks in Impressions.
The assumtion I make from this (bearing in mind these figures are an average of all your pages) is that during these short periods you are getting a greater number of your pages sharing SERPs, this would increase the number of impressions impressions, while at the same time your pages are competing against each other, so they can’t possibly all have the top spot, therefore the average position will be lower.
If this is the case, is it necessarily a bad thing? If a number of your pages are dominating SERPS it may not be bad at all. Many people see an average as an absolute figure, but forget that it does not portray extremes, whether they exist or not, it’s just the middle ground.
So if your average is not first page, there is still a very good chance you are making first page, you may still have a number one spot, but other pages that come lower drag down the average figure.
I can assume the X axis represents time (though the intervals are unspecified). But you did not include the Y axis values. The graph could represent min - max fluctuations anywhere from 0 to infinity or from 0 to 0.001 eg.
What are the minimum and maximum Y axis values?
Are the intervals daily, weekly, hourly?
Correct, though we don’t see the scale here.
But to give a clue, the sampling is daily, so this looks like a number of months.
In the Position graph the scale is inverted with 0 at the top and greater values to the bottom, again no scale is seen.
For clicks the scale goes from 0 at the bottom up to higher values, same for Impressions.
CTR (click through rate) goes the same way, the value represents a percentage.
Thanks, that was very helpful.
The only pattern i detected was that the dips are mostly in the beginning of the week, followed by the second half of the week but alsmost never on weekends.
Some of my (top) pages have overlapping - not duplicate - content. in the same way a sports website would have overlapping pages about sports teams. So it could indeed be that these pages are competing with each other. Those top pages do make first page, mostly #1 position even.
Y axis max/min values: 45/0. Intervals are daily over the course of this year.
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