John Mueller from Google has explained why a site may get a rank for keyword that is not related to the site at all. Sharing the information on Reddit while giving a response to a thread that is titled:
“My website has clicks from keywords that I can’t find my site using them. How is this possible?”
It seems that the thread poster is quite puzzled to be ranked with the keywords that have been showing on the search console report. However, they have not managed to find the site while using the same keywords. Not just one or two pages, they have looked upon in almost 10 pages.
Therefore, there are unable to understand why the site is showcased with those keywords. What may be the reason behind it?
Regarding ranking with random keywords, John Mueller from Google has said that site can be seen with unexpected queries. However, easy replication of the result is not possible always. One of the reasons for such phenomenon can be local targeting and personalization.
Mueller has also said “Usually that’s personalization & local targeting. Often you can guess if the queries are expected to have a large amount of impressions, and if your site is listed as being in the higher positions, but it just gets very few impressions. You also see this when you drill in by date and see that it’s just getting very few impressions sporadically (rather than regularly).”
In addition, Mueller has told that images used on the site can be cause behind this also. Sometime, site images can be pulled into one box that can be found at the top of search result. It can be found through the knowledge panel on the side also.
If an image is showcased with the knowledge panel or one box then it can create an impression on the search console. In case an unusual keyword acquires high number of impressions with good ranking in addition to few clicks then images can be the reason for ranking through those keyword searches.
Mueller has explained “Another option is from images. Some queries sometimes show image one-boxes (where you have a bunch of images towards the top of the results), and if an image from your pages is shown there, you’d see that as an impression in Search Console (similarly if the image is shown in the knowledge panel part on the side). I suspect not a lot of these images get clicks, so it can appear that you have a large number of impressions, a high position, but few clicks for those queries.”
In the end, Mueller has recommended to analyze data within the Search Console through a different approach. Through the method, you can know from where the impression is coming from. Origin country can be identified. Advanced search setting can be adjusted on the basis of the country. Now, you may able to see what the users are observing also.
It is said “When trying these out, make sure to drill down in the report to the appropriate country version, and use the appropriate advanced search setting for that country, so that you’re as close to what users see as you can.”