Search Console: finding the wins that cost little effort

The client wants to know what the next month is supposed to deliver, and the budget covers two days. Search Console is open: 18,000 rows, four columns. Sorting by clicks shows what is already working. What makes this expensive is not the one wrongly chosen measure but that the rows with the biggest gap between visibility and return sit right at the bottom when you sort by clicks, and therefore stay untouched quarter after quarter.

How to go about it in JMX

1. Crawl first. Run the domain through in the Crawl tab. Without a loaded crawl the On the page column and the link score stay empty later, and “position 8” turns into no task at all.
2. Connect. The Search Console tab, Connect to Google button, select the property. The OAuth client is your own.
3. Analyse. The Search insights tab: choose property and period (28 days to 16 months), tick Compare with the previous period, then Analyse. The tick costs a second request and is the precondition for Gained and Lost.
4. Keep the brand out. Enter your spellings in the Brand regex (RE2) field and tick Exclude regex (non-brand). Otherwise the company name heads every list.
5. Work through Within reach. Position 4 to 20, from 50 impressions. The Clicks available column calculates against the usual click-through rate of the current position, not against first place. On the page says whether the words of the query appear in the title, the H1 and the text. If it is missing from the H1, that is a quick fix.
6. Check Good position, almost no clicks. Top ten places, click-through rate below half of what is usual there. A title and description job, the only lever that needs no new content.
7. Look at Reach without foundation. Four findings: not found in the crawl, internally unlinked, never fetched by a bot, missing from the sitemap. An internal link to a page that is already collecting impressions is the cheapest measure here.

What to watch out for

Clicks available is not a promise. The expected click-through rate is a rule of thumb: brand queries sit above it, queries with an AI answer in the result below it. A row in Good position, almost no clicks can simply mean that an AI Overview sits above your result — in which case a new title changes little. Look at the query in a browser once before you rewrite twenty snippets.

The analysis is capped at 25,000 rows per period, and what is then missing is precisely the rows with the fewest clicks — that is, exactly the ones Within reach aims at; on large properties a period comparison can therefore mark pages as lost that only slipped below the limit. The cap is noted above the view. JMX works only with what Google hands out: anonymised queries are missing, retention reaches no further back than 16 months, and this view delivers no comparison against competitors, because that would presuppose a search index of one’s own.

Two special cases. Discover and News publish no queries — Within reach, Good position, almost no clicks and Own pages competing are omitted there, while Site sections and the trend still apply. And several of your own pages on one query are not automatically a mistake: a category and an advice article may rank side by side. It becomes a problem when the weaker page takes impressions from the stronger one without delivering itself.

Pull the same analysis again four weeks later and Gained and Lost show which of the rows you worked through moved anything — and at the next budget you are no longer arguing about whether the two days were worth it.