Opportunities

Opportunities are the positive side of RankDebug: places where your own Search Console history says a page could earn more clicks than it does. Each one carries a number of clicks at stake, and the list is ordered by it, so the first rows are the ones worth the most.

How they are computed

Opportunities are scored once a day per workspace, after the Search Console pull, and stored as a dated snapshot. Nothing is recomputed when you open the page.

Each snapshot looks at the most recent 28 days of settled data, leaving out the last few days that Search Console is still revising. A page and query pair needs at least 100 impressions in that window to count, because below that its position and CTR are noise.

To judge whether a CTR is low, RankDebug needs to know what CTR a position normally earns. It fits that curve from your own site wherever there are enough page and query pairs at a position, and falls back to a general curve elsewhere.

The four kinds

Near Win. A page and query ranking in positions 4 to 15. Clicks at stake are the extra clicks its impressions would earn at the CTR of position 3. These are the pages where a small improvement moves the most traffic.

Low CTR. A page and query on the first page of results whose CTR is less than half of what its position normally earns. Clicks at stake are the clicks it would earn at the normal CTR. This usually points to the title or the snippet, not the ranking.

Decay. A page that lost at least 30% of its clicks compared with the four weeks before, falling at least 30 points further than the site as a whole, while still ranking in the top 20. It needs at least 20 clicks in the earlier window. The site's own change is taken out first, so a sitewide drop does not make every page look like it decayed. Clicks at stake are what the page would have kept had it moved with the site.

Cannibalisation. Two or more of your pages splitting one query's impressions, each with at least a fifth of them, and trading the top spot on at least three days. Clicks at stake are what the other pages' impressions would earn at the leading page's CTR.

Each snapshot keeps up to 200 of each kind.

Using the page

The Opportunities page lists them with the kind, page, query, impressions, position and clicks at stake, and can be filtered to one kind. Open a row to see the numbers behind it. The export downloads every opportunity of the latest snapshot as CSV, with the evidence for each.