What seven clinic Search Console reports show about clicks, impressions and position

Most clinic owners who open Google Search Console look at one number first: average position. Then they close the tab, because the number says 17 and 17 sounds like page two.

How we run search for clinics like these is on the page for SEO for physical therapists.

We looked at seven Search Console reports from physical therapy and pelvic floor clinic websites we worked on. Between them they recorded 87,930 clicks from about 4.1 million impressions (4,119,181), across periods between March 2023 and May 2024.

Every one of them had an average position worse than 13. Every one of them still earned thousands of clicks. This piece explains why both are true, and what a clinic owner should read instead.

The seven reports

Clinics are labeled by type only. Figures are as printed in each clinic's Search Console Performance report.

Three things the numbers show

1. Average position hid the clicks

Average positions ran from 13.49 to 28.4, with a median of 17.44. CTR ran from 1.4% to 2.7%, with a median of 1.7%. If position 17 really meant "nobody sees you," none of these clinics would have clicks in the thousands.

The reason is how Search Console builds the figure. Average position is averaged across every query a site appears for. A clinic can sit near the top for "physical therapy near me" in its own town, where people click, and also sit at position 60 for hundreds of loosely related searches, where nobody clicks. The second group adds impressions and drags the average down without costing clicks. It is like judging a restaurant by the average distance of everyone who walked past it.

2. It took 37 to 71 impressions to earn one click

Dividing impressions by clicks gives the number of times a clinic appeared in Google for each visit it got:

Overall it took 46.8 impressions for each click. This is the figure to watch month to month: if impressions climb and the ratio stays flat, the new visibility is earning visits. If impressions climb and the ratio worsens, the site is showing up for searches that do not lead anywhere.

3. Size of the report says more about the period than the clinic

The periods run from 82 days (clinic F) to 380 days (clinic A). Per day, clicks ranged from 14.3 (E) to 139.5 (A):

Clinic F looks small in the main table but earned more clicks per day than four of the others. Compare reports over the same length of time before drawing conclusions.

What a clinic owner can check in ten minutes

1. Open Search Console, Performance, and set the date range to the last 3 months.
2. Divide total impressions by total clicks. That is your impressions per click.
3. Click the Queries tab and sort by clicks. The top 20 queries are where your search visits come from. Note their position, which is often better than the site average.
4. Sort by impressions. Queries with high impressions and no clicks are either a page that needs a better title, or searches you were never going to win. Either answer is useful.
5. Repeat in a month, same length of period.

What this data does not show

• These are seven sites, not a sample of the industry. Read them as seven case notes, not a benchmark.
• The reports show where each clinic stood in its period. They do not show what caused it, and they say nothing about future results.
• Periods differ in length and season, so totals are not comparable without the per-day view.
• Search Console counts clicks from Google Search only. It does not count calls, bookings or patients.

Method

• Source: each clinic's own Google Search Console Performance report, as printed on our client results page (read November 8, 2026). Clinics are not named.
• Scope: the seven physical therapy and pelvic floor results on that page. The eighth result on the page, from a different kind of clinic, is not included.
• Totals: the sum of the seven printed click and impression figures. Overall CTR 2.13% and impressions per click 46.8 come from those totals.
• Medians: of the seven printed CTR and position values.
• Days: counted inclusively from the printed start and end dates (2024 is a leap year).
• Per-day and per-click figures are rounded to one decimal.
• The "change versus previous period" figures printed on the client results page are left out, because the previous-period values are not printed and cannot be checked.