Guides 8 Sep 2026 4 min read by Kalum

Turn your Search Console export into an action plan

Everyone exports the CSV. Almost nobody does anything with it. Here are the six things to pull out of that file, in order, and what each one tells you to do this week.

Search Console is the only free source of truth about how your site performs in Google. It is also, for most people, a page they open when traffic drops, stare at, and close.

The export fixes that. Once the data is in a spreadsheet you can ask it questions the interface will not answer, and each question maps to something specific to do.

Getting the right export

1. Search Console → Performance → Search results.
2. Date range → Last 3 months. Shorter is noisy; longer hides recent change.
3. Turn on all four metrics — clicks, impressions, CTR, average position. If you forget this, the export is missing the two columns that matter most.
4. Export → Download CSV. You get a ZIP containing Queries.csv, Pages.csv, Dates.csv, Devices.csv and Countries.csv.

Two limits worth knowing. The interface and the export cap at 1,000 rows per report, so a large site sees only the top slice — if that is you, filter to one section of the site at a time and export each. And Search Console anonymises rare queries, so the totals in Queries.csv will not match the totals in Dates.csv. That is expected, not a bug.

While you are there, grab one more: Links → Top linked pages → Export. You will want it for the off-page half.

1. Striking distance — the pages to improve this week

In Queries.csv, filter Position between 3.5 and 20, and Impressions above 100. Sort by impressions.

Better, add a column that estimates what moving to position 3 is worth:

gain = (impressions ÷ 3) × (0.10 − ctr)

Sort by that instead, and the list is now ordered by clicks you would actually gain per month. The top five are this week's work. The full method is here.

2. Snippets that lose clicks — the cheapest traffic on the site

Filter Position to 5 or better, Impressions above 100, and CTR below about 3%.

These pages already rank. People see them and choose something else. That is a title and meta description problem, and fixing it does not require moving a single rank — which makes it the highest return per minute in this entire document.

For each one: put the exact query near the front of the title, add the differentiator that is actually true (a number, the year, "free", "without X"), and rewrite the meta description so it answers the search in one sentence rather than describing the article.

3. Queries with no page — what to write next

Sort Queries.csv by impressions and read the top 100. You are looking for queries that are clearly about a topic you have no dedicated page for — Google is showing some loosely related page of yours because it has nothing better from you.

These are the best new-article ideas you will ever get, because they come with proof of demand and proof that Google already associates your site with the topic. That is a much warmer start than a keyword you found in a tool.

4. Pages with no queries — the dead weight

Now open Pages.csv and compare it against a list of all your published URLs. Anything published more than six months ago that appears with almost no impressions is not being considered by Google at all.

For each: is it thin, is it a near-duplicate of another post, or is it orphaned with no internal links pointing at it? Usually one of the three. Merge and redirect, or link it properly from relevant posts and give it a real reason to exist. A smaller site of pages that each deserve to rank is stronger than a big one carrying dead weight.

5. Cannibalisation — where you compete with yourself

This one is worth the extra five minutes. In the Search Console interface, filter by a specific query, then open the Pages tab. If two or three of your URLs all show impressions for it, they are splitting the signal and none of them ranks as well as one strong page would.

Do this for your top 20 queries. When you find a case, decide which URL should own the query, merge the useful parts of the others into it, 301 the losers, and point the internal links at the winner.

6. What changed since last time

This is why you keep the old exports. Put last quarter's Pages.csv next to this one and compute the click difference per URL.

• Biggest losers — the pages to diagnose first. Here is the checklist for that.
• Biggest gainers — more interesting than the losers, and almost always ignored. Work out what those pages have in common, then do more of it deliberately.
• Pages you edited — did the edit work? This is the only way to find out, and it is how you stop taking SEO advice on faith and start knowing what works on your site.

Making it a habit

A realistic rhythm for one person:

When	What	Time
Monthly	Export, refresh the striking-distance list, fix two snippets	1 hour
Quarterly	Compare with last quarter, diagnose the losers, check cannibalisation	2 hours
Twice a year	Pages with no impressions — merge, redirect or delete	2 hours

Keep every export in a dated folder. Two years of quarterly exports is a record of your site nobody can sell you, and it is the difference between guessing and knowing.

If keeping that up sounds like admin you will stop doing by March — that is precisely what the tool on this site automates. It reads the same export, builds the same six lists, and hands you the top of each one as a to-do list. Same method, none of the spreadsheet.

Read next

Striking distance keywords: the traffic you already own

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