Have you ever wondered not just where your community was ranking in Google search queries, but also how many search impressions those queries generated and how many clicks? Well, you can find out.

Google Webmaster Tools is a free, cool service provided by Google that allows you do a myriad of things related to your site, such as seeing how Google is indexing it and if they have any problems, configuring sitemaps, checking site performance and more. But, today, I want to share the search queries area.

Before you are able to access your site on the service, you need to go to their website and sign up. You’ll need to add your site and verify that you own it. This is all pretty quick and painless. Once you’re all confirmed, login and, in the left menu, select “Search queries” under “Your site on the web.”

You’ll now be greeted by a Google Analytics-style chart, showing how many impressions and clicks you have received in and from Google search results in the past 30 days or so. Impressions are the number of times that your site has shown up in a search result on Google and clicks, of course, are the number of times that people have clicked your site directly from a Google search result.

Below the chart, you’ll see a list of queries that your site has ranked for. Check out the screen capture below to see an example. It’s the “karate forums” search query and stats related to KarateForums.com.

Here is what you’re seeing: KarateForums.com has appeared approximately 480 times on Google searches for “karate forums” (without the quotes) in the past 30 days. The average position of those appearances is 1.9. And those impressions have generated 210 clicks. This means that every time KarateForums.com appears on a search for “karate forums,” there is a 44% chance it will get clicked.

Below those summary numbers, you see numbers divided by placement and this tells a deeper story. I have held the number one slot for “karate forums” tightly for a long time. So, if you search “karate forums,” the site is there. But, the site is actually popping up multiple times on the same page.

If I type in the search query now, I see that we are both number 1 and number 2 and the second link has sitelinks attached to it. My guess is that if you have two links on a page, that counts as two impressions. So, really, there have been about 260 searches for “karate forums” over the past 30 days. I have been number 1 for virtually all of them and then I have had the second link on 210 of those 260 or so. Or something along those lines.

This dilutes the click-through-rate or CTR a bit, but who cares about numbers when you can have two links on a given results page? Plus, you can fix the numbers. When people search for “karate forums,” 81% of the time they click on the KarateForums.com link that is at the number one slot. 8% of the time, they click the one that is listed second. So, my real CTR is somewhere around 89%. Meaning, that when people search for “karate forums,” 89% of the time, they click on KarateForums.com.

I found this to be pretty cool, so I wanted to share it. When you have an opportunity, take a look at your site and find out just how often Google is showing you to their visitors and to what effect.