Question about search volume

cyrus451 said:

Ok, well that makes way more sense then. So Google will only display an 'impression' in google webmaster tools if the user clicks to the page your site is listed in the index. So in theory if I can get my site on the first page the 'impressions' should jump drastically?

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Correct.

RuthSam said:

This explains it all very well.

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I understand that fully, my question was simply why are my impressions and search volume not adding up to that in webmaster tools. I believe like the previous user stated it is because google does not count impressions unless the searcher clicks to the page that your results are on. ie in my case clicks to page two.

sub001 said:

Correct.

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Man, thanks so much. It really explains why I see such drastic changes when my sites are not in the top ten. Ive been thinking like wtf these keywords are useless and get no traffic. The issue has been that to see the correct level of impressions to equal that of keyword tool data, you need your site on the first page. I will work on getting my site up 9 spots to number 10 and see if our theory is correct.

Yes it is correct, an impression is only generated when google displays your results. Just wanted to post to confirm it because the other posts are on the right track. Still, its also true that there are sometimes discrepancies, but not huge ones like that.

One last thing. lets say you have a new website, list it in google and it gets indexed.

MatteoMatt said:

Yes it is correct, an impression is only generated when google displays your results. Just wanted to post to confirm it because the other posts are on the right track. Still, its also true that there are sometimes discrepancies, but not huge ones like that.

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Thanks for giving your input Matt. I think we are on the right track to figuring this out. I do agree that a few hundred impressions either way is to be expected as it can fluctuate from month to month. I was thinking like damn i do all this keyword research and rank the site and the impressions are WAY off lol. The keyword is a popular term so I was thinking how could that few ppl be searching for the keyword daily. Totally makes sense webmaster tools only counts an impression if a user views the search results page your site is displayed.

One thing to note though. When I rank a new site and lets say its a low comp keyword and google places it in the index around page 3. If you login to webmaster tools it shows the keywords you now rank for and the impressions are like maybe 1 to 5 per day. This just means that someone clicked through to the 3rd page of the results and your site was listed.

cyrus451 said:

When I rank a new site and lets say its a low comp keyword and google places it in the index around page 3. If you login to webmaster tools it shows the keywords you now rank for and the impressions are like maybe 1 to 5 per day. This just means that someone clicked through to the 3rd page of the results and your site was listed.

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Either that, or people have changed the Search settings to show more than 10 results per page (for example, I have it set to show the first 100).

sub001 said:

Either that, or people have changed the Search settings to show more than 10 results per page (for example, I have it set to show the first 100).

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Yep that too. Thanks for all the help sub001