There is a free tool from Google that tells you which searches showed your website, how many people saw it, how many clicked, and where you sat in the results. Not an estimate from a third party. The actual figures, from the company doing the ranking.
Almost every Nigerian business with a website is entitled to this and has never looked at it. It is called Google Search Console, and it answers a question no other tool can.
The four numbers, and what they really mean
The Performance report is built on four figures. They sound obvious and three of them are commonly misread.
Impressions. How many times your site appeared in search results. Google counts an impression whenever your link appears on the current page of results, whether or not the person scrolled far enough to see it. So an impression is not proof anybody laid eyes on you. The exception is carousels and results that have to be expanded by a click, which only count once they are actually scrolled to or opened.
Clicks. How many times somebody clicked through to your site. Google counts a click only when it sends the person to a page outside Google. Clicking something that keeps them inside Google is not a click.
Click-through rate. Clicks divided by impressions. Simple arithmetic, and the most useful single number on the report, because it tells you whether the people who saw you found you worth choosing.
Average position. This is the one almost everybody reads wrong. It is the average position of your topmost result, across every search where you appeared. If you rank fortieth for one phrase and third for another, your average sits between them and describes neither. Position is a starting point for a question, not an answer.
One more thing worth knowing. The report can group figures by property or by page, and the choice changes the numbers. Grouped by property, a site appearing twice on one results page counts as a single impression. Grouped by page, each unique page counts separately. Google notes that click-through rate and average position generally look higher when grouping by property, so two people reading the same account can honestly report different figures.
And the newest data moves. Google marks preliminary data with a dotted line on the graph, because it is still being collected and may change within hours.
Why this is not Google Analytics
Google's own framing is the clearest one available, so it is worth using directly. Search Console covers what happened before somebody arrived at your website from Google. Analytics covers what they did once they got there.
Which means Search Console answers questions Analytics simply cannot. What did people type. Which of your pages Google is actually showing. Where you sit against everyone else. Analytics cannot know any of that, because by the time Analytics starts working, the search is over.
The two will never agree on numbers, and Google says so plainly. Clicks and sessions are counted differently, and timezones, consent banners, tagging errors and attribution all pull them further apart. If somebody shows you a report where the two match exactly, be suspicious.
The reports worth your time
There are more than a dozen. Four matter to a normal business.
Performance. The four numbers above, broken down by search query, by page, by country and by device. This is where you find out that people are reaching you through a phrase you never thought to use.
Page indexing. Which of your pages Google can find and index, and what went wrong with the ones it could not. Worth noting that Google itself says if your site has fewer than five hundred pages you probably do not need this report, and suggests a site: search instead.
Sitemaps. Where you tell Google the address of your sitemap, and where you see whether it was read.
URL Inspection. Paste in any address on your site and Google tells you what it knows about that page, and whether it could be indexed.
Setting it up, and the bit that surprises people
It is free. Google says so in its own documentation, and also says you do not need it in order to appear in search results at all. It is a window, not a switch.
There are two kinds of property. A URL-prefix property covers one exact address, such as https://yoursite.com. A domain property covers the whole domain, every subdomain and both http and https.
Here is the part that surprises people, including a lot of developers. A domain property does not need any code on your website. Not a file, not a tag, nothing. You prove ownership by adding a DNS record at whoever manages your domain. Nothing is installed on the site at all.
URL-prefix properties have more options: an HTML file uploaded to the site, a meta tag in the page head, an existing Google Analytics tracking code, or a Google Tag Manager container. Sites built on Google Sites or Blogger verify automatically.
One permission note, because it causes confusion in agencies. You must be an owner or a full user of the property to request indexing through the URL Inspection tool. Read-only access will not do it.
What to do this week
Verify the site. Open the Performance report. Sort by impressions rather than clicks, and read the list of search queries.
You are looking for two things. Phrases where you are getting a lot of impressions and very few clicks, which means you are appearing and being passed over. And phrases you never expected, which is your market telling you in its own words what it actually calls the thing you sell.
That second list is worth more than most keyword research, and it costs nothing.
Our free deep digital audit checks whether your website is being measured at all, and whether the measurement can be trusted, entirely from the outside.