Clicks vs impressions — what is the difference?

Clicks and impressions in Google Search Console measure two different stages of the same journey, and the gap between them is where the useful signal sits:

• Impressions — how many times your pages appeared in someone’s results (visibility)
• Clicks — how many of those people actually came to your site (traffic)
• Click-through rate (CTR) — clicks divided by impressions, the share who chose your result

Reading the two together tells you which problem you have. Plenty of impressions but few clicks means you are ranking, but your title and meta description are not winning the click — a copy problem. Few impressions at all means a ranking or indexing problem, and no amount of better copy helps until the page starts appearing. High impressions with low CTR is the easiest SEO win a small business has: rewrite the title and description, change nothing else.