An impression occurs when a listing appears as a search result for a users query.

Not all impressions will appear above the page’s fold,  making it important to monitor your rankings & use Pay-Per-Click to increase SERP exposure while working on building high rankings. 

Why Impressions Are Important For SEO & SEM

Impressions are important to SEO & SEM as they give more information on how a bot perceives your content, as well as how user’s search for it.

When a search engine shows your site as an impression, it has determined that your content is closely aligned with the query that was searched for.

This can lead webmasters to realize that perhaps there are semantic topics that they should be targeting, as their site is already being perceived as about those topics.

It can also be used to establish how many queries your content is getting considered for due to personalization vs. true organic ranking & relevancy.

Impressions reports should be reviewed often & play a role in how you shape your site’s future content strategy.

Queries that receive many impressions but a low Click-Through-Rate (CTR) should be examined closely to see if perhaps they are better suited to sit on their own page where more relevant detail can be added to them to improve performance.