Help / Analytics & insights / Search insights
Search insights
For everyone who reads the numbers · ~5 min read · Last reviewed 22 July 2026
Search Console data answers two different questions: “which client needs me today?” and “what moved, and was it big?”. Search insights is SeoKestrel’s answer to both — computed once per night, presented the same way on every surface, and honest about the days Google has not finished counting yet.
What this is
Each night, after the day’s Search Console data lands, SeoKestrel precomputes a per-client insights snapshot: site-level momentum, query movers, and a year-on-year comparison. The home page, each client’s Overview, and the Monday email all read from that same snapshot — so no two surfaces ever disagree about a client.
Portfolio triage on the home page
Every client card on your home page carries a two-part status line: the data state (“Data through 9 Jul 2026”, “No Search Console”, or “Awaiting first data”) and the clicks momentum for the current window (for example “+12.3% clicks” with a trend glyph). Low-volume clients show “Low volume” instead of a percentage — a delta on twelve clicks is not a trend. Scan the column, find the client that moved, click through.
Query movers
On the client Overview, the Search movers section shows three tables from the nightly precompute:
- Winning queries and losing queries — the queries that gained or lost the most clicks between the current window and the previous one.
- Striking distance — queries ranking just outside the top results, where a small push can produce an outsized click gain.
The window sentence under the heading states exactly what was compared — “settled data only” — and the impressions floor below which queries are not listed.
The Monday digest
Every Monday morning, SeoKestrel emails a digest of each client’s winners, losers, and striking-distance queries — the subject line is “SeoKestrel weekly movers — week of <date>”. It goes to the workspace’s configured alert recipients and deliberately excludes the demo client. If nothing cleared the volume floors that week, no numbers are invented to fill the space.
Year-on-year lines
KPI cards can carry a second line such as “+38% vs last year”, comparing the current window with the same calendar window one year back. The comparison is gated: the prior-year baseline must have enough days of data and both windows must clear a volume floor. A failed gate renders nothing — a wrong year-on-year number is the most damaging figure on the page, because it is the one owners trust most.
Good to know
- All insight windows end at the settled-data edge, not at today. The footnote (“Data through …”) is the authoritative date; when ingestion has fallen behind it switches to “Last known data through …” so staleness is visible, not hidden.
- Movers are anchored to their own nightly window, not to the page’s date picker — changing the date range does not recompute them.
- A brand-new connection shows “Movers compute nightly from settled Search Console data — the first run lands tomorrow morning.” That is a schedule, not an error.
FAQ
- Why does my dashboard stop three days before today?
- Google finalises Search Console data a few days in arrears. SeoKestrel anchors every window at that settled edge, so a delta never includes half-counted days. The footnote on each surface tells you the exact date: "Data through …".
- A keyword I care about is missing from the movers tables.
- Movers list only queries above an impressions floor, stated under the heading ("queries under N impressions not listed"). Below that floor, click swings are statistical noise and would produce alarming nonsense.
- Where did the year-on-year line go?
- The YoY line renders only when the prior-year baseline is complete enough to trust — enough days of data and enough volume in both windows. When the gate fails, SeoKestrel shows nothing rather than a caveated guess.