Big news from Google Webmaster Tools!  This month, Google unveiled richer data about the search queries your site is visible for in the Top Search Queries section of Google Webmaster Tools.  You can now view the number of impressions, number of clicks and clickthrough rate associated with the search queries your site is visible for.  And better yet, you can review that data position-by-position, and for each page of your site that was visible for a given query.

Managing our clients’ pay-per-click accounts, we’re used to monitoring metrics like “impressions”, “clicks” and “clickthrough rate”.  But as an internet marketing company that also specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), we have frequently longed for similar performance data for the organic search aspect of our clients’ online visibility.

Until now, we’ve only been able to track the success of our SEO efforts in terms of website visits or point-in-time rankings. Now, for the first time, Google Webmaster Tools gives us the chance to look at the visibility of a website one step prior to a visitor arriving.

This sort of data allows us to answer all kinds of questions, like “How much of a difference does position make on clickthrough rate?”, and “Which of the pages on my site do a better job of inviting a searcher to clickthrough?”, “Do I have pages competing for visibility on the same keywords?”, and so on.

Of course, Google Webmaster Tools only offers a look into your site’s performance on Google’s search engine – but given that Google still commands over 65% of all US search traffic, it’s still very useful and relevant information!