Well, yes and no. What should happen is that all your traffic gets directed to one version – so all the data in GSC will be on that version and the other 3 versions should have no data. The advantage of having all 4 versions is to help you keep an eye on that and make sure no traffic is accidentally going to the other 3 versions. So it’s not ‘essential’ to have all 4 versions, but it is ‘best practice’. Hope that helps!

Do I really need to add all four variations to get the full benefit?

Great to hear you found this helpful! OK, so to get ‘position’, you have to toggle ‘position’ on. Look above the graph and you should see ‘total clicks’ and ‘total impressions’ are coloured, but ‘average position’ is white. Click on ‘average position’ and you will get a ‘position’ column in the table below. Hope that helps!

Thanks for this post, it’s really helpful!
I’m stuck at step 6) Number of search queries you rank number 1 for (and top 3 and top 10)…because I don’t have the filter “position”. I only have “clic”, “impressions” and “most frequent queries”

Thanks for you help

You are very welcome – glad you found it helpful!

#1 Yes, you can do that. The advantage of my way is it helps you to identify if any traffic is going to the wrong version and not being redirected to your ‘main’ version.

#2 You can toggle on CTR and position by clicking on the white squares above the line graph (they will turn coloured, like clicks and impressions). Then you can sort the table using CTR and position.

Hope that helps!

Also, when I scroll down to Pages and try to find info to rank the top 10 posts for CTR and position for the month, it looks like I have to drill down to each individual post to gather that data. Am I missing a quicker way? If not, is there a way to narrow down which posts I should look at to gather the info? I only have 20 or so posts now but I can see this being cumbersome when I have a lot more. Thanks for your help!

You’re welcome!

Sure – I have a whole article on cornerstone content here >>> https://www.productiveblogging.com/cornerstone-content-increase-blog-traffic/ Hope that helps!