Search Console workflows for finding commercial opportunities

Before you start: set up the view

Use a Domain property where you can, so data from all subdomains and protocols is included. If your marketing site and product live on different subdomains, a separate URL-prefix property for the marketing site can stop product-related queries crowding the tables.

In the Performance report, open Search results, set the search type to Web and switch on all four metrics: total clicks, total impressions, average CTR and average position. Use the last three months for discovery work and the last 28 days for routine monitoring.

The most recent days of data can be incomplete and may change slightly, so avoid drawing conclusions from the final day or two of any range.

Workflow one: isolate non-brand queries

Brand searches almost always have strong positions and high click-through rates, so they make overall figures look healthier than your commercial visibility. Filtering them out comes first in every other workflow.

Add a filter, choose Query, then Custom (regex), and select Doesn't match regex. Enter your company name, product names and common misspellings separated by vertical bars, for example: acme|acmehq|acme cloud|akme. Search Console uses RE2 syntax, which has no lookaheads, so this option is the way to exclude terms.

For a commercial view, use Matches regex with modifiers such as: pricing|cost|demo|trial|alternative|vs|best|software|integration. Search Console accepts one query filter at a time, so to combine this with the brand exclusion, export the commercial view and remove brand rows in a spreadsheet.

Workflow two: compare 28-day periods

Open the date selector, choose the Compare tab and select the option comparing the last 28 days with the previous period. A 28-day window contains four complete weeks, so both periods include the same mix of weekdays and weekends, which matters for B2B sites whose search activity follows the working week.

The table then shows each metric for both periods side by side. Sort by the difference in clicks or impressions to see which queries moved most, then switch to the Pages tab to see the same changes by URL.

Read the results in groups rather than query by query. One query losing a few positions may be noise; several related commercial queries declining on the same page is a pattern worth investigating, perhaps following a content change, a template update or a new competing page. For seasonal businesses, add a year-over-year comparison from the same menu.

Workflow three: find striking-distance commercial queries

Striking-distance queries are those where your page ranks just below the top results, roughly positions four to twenty. The page already has some relevance, so improving its content, title or internal links has a reasonable chance of producing movement.

Using a three-month range and your commercial regex, open the filter control above the queries table and add Position greater than 3. Export the results, remove rows with a position above twenty, drop brand rows and sort by impressions. The queries at the top are commercial searches where you appear often but rarely in the most-clicked positions.

For each candidate, click the query and check the Pages tab. A pricing query ranking ninth with a blog post is a different problem from the same query ranking ninth with your pricing page: the first needs a better-matched page, the second needs the pricing page itself strengthened.

Keep the exported list as a baseline. Re-running the same export a month or two after making changes shows whether the target queries moved, and whether similar queries you did not touch moved in the same way, which helps separate the effect of your changes from wider fluctuations.

Workflow four: read CTR against position

Click-through rate typically falls sharply below the top few positions, so CTR on its own says little. The useful question is whether a query's CTR is low for its position compared with similar queries on your own site.

Export non-brand queries covering at least three months, round average position to the nearest whole number and calculate the median CTR for each position. Then flag queries whose CTR sits well below the median for their position and which have enough impressions for the difference to mean something. These are candidates for clearer titles and meta descriptions.

Interpret the results with care. Average position is averaged across impressions, so a query shown at position two for some searches and fifteen for others can look like position eight. Ads, featured snippets and other results features can reduce clicks at any position. And some low CTRs are correct: a query your page appears for but does not really answer should not be forced to attract clicks.

Workflow five: check whether pages compete

Click a commercial query and open the Pages tab. If more than one URL receives impressions, note how impressions and clicks are divided and which URL holds the better position. Repeat for your main commercial query groups.

A split between closely related pages, such as a product page and a blog post on the same topic, can indicate cannibalisation. Options include consolidating them, sharpening each page's distinct purpose, or strengthening internal links towards the page that should rank. Check first whether the URLs genuinely serve different intents, because some splits are legitimate.

Doing all of this by hand has practical limits: interface exports include up to 1,000 rows, some queries are withheld for privacy and never appear in the tables, and repeating the workflows every month takes time. PipelineMap runs the same analysis on authorised Search Console data, connected directly or imported from an export, and keeps the reasoning behind each finding visible.

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