If you have ever engaged in an SEO campaign of some kind, at some point you probably raise your eyebrows skeptically looking at a ranking report that told you that you are supposed to be on page one, because every time you did a search for it, you found out that you were on page 2.
Conflicting ranking reports and results are usually the result of Google doing what Google does best, tailoring search results to make sure that you are getting good and relevant results for your query.
Search is more and more being custom tailored to each individual search her. That's how Google is staying relevant. Gone are the days of sweeping, Universal rankings across the board. Those just don't make sense, and they don't offer quality enough results to keep Google's primary customers, you and me whenever we search, happy.
Google Now personalizes results to the best of their ability. This can be done in a number of different ways, but the three biggest ones that are easy to spot are personalization by the device upon which your browsing, the location where you are browsing, and whatever your online history of browsing is.
Device is important because different screen sizes display content in different ways. Desktop computers make a website look one way, mobile computers make a website look a different way. Google has been keenly aware of this for quite some time, hence the mobilegeddeon update of April of last year, and it's reprisal of April again this year. Traditional websites are built to be viewed on a desktop computer, and on a small handheld screen they simply do not show up well. This frustrates users, who eventually get frustrated with the search engine that they are using. Or at least so goes the thinking. So to make sure that users searching from a mobile device get the best search result possible, Google has essentially instituted two separate search engines, one of them from mobile, and one of them from desktop. If you search from a mobile device, more often than not Google will have weeded out nearly all of the non-mobile responsive websites that would be there. Google says that they won't absolutely remove you based upon non-mobile responsiveness, and that makes sense if there is a certain website that is simply enough of an authority to Warrant putting up with the awkwardness of having to resize your screen on a mobile device, but by and large most non mobile friendly websites are simply out. In fact, the new trend is to make things even faster and more mobile-friendly with the AMP update.
Location is equally important, and this is actually amazing for local businesses because it means you have a better chance of showing up in your local Marketplace, even when competing against what was traditionally a much more well digitally entrenched competitor. Google knows that we want local results when we search for phrases with local intent, and it tries to give us the best result. I had a client who every time they searched for their name would find themselves the top of page 1, as long as he was at work. When he went home he was nowhere on page one. This is 100% Google Taylor in the search results based upon his location.
Lastly online history. Where you search is Google's knowledge if you let Google have that knowledge. If you are signed into Google+ and you have not disabled search recording which is the default for Google, it knows what you search for and will start to predict with good regularity sites that are more likely to be what you're looking for. Of course, for many people, this creeps them out a lot, and they simply turn off the future.
Personally I like it overall. I can always bypass it by browsing in private mode or browsing signed out. It's very reminiscent of the marketing scene from that Tom Cruise flick Minority Report where he lines up with somebody else's eyes, and all of the digital advertising of the future recognize him via some sort of retinal scan and start advertising to him as though he was this other individual, Mr. Yakimoto.
So does this mean that SEO is dead? Obviously not. But it does mean that SEO has to evolve, it has to change and adapt to the ways that search is going. (FACT: 99% of the people out there who are purported SEOs have no idea what actually works, and most of them just used outdated techniques like spamming and Link building to get you to rank. But I'll get off my personal soapbox about that.)
Tracking keywords is very important, because tracking keywords now gives you a baseline to know roughly where you stand. All things being equal, you will still show up more frequently and more often and higher up in the search results, if you have a good Baseline ranking. To see your Baseline ranking simply browse in an anonymous mode, and I delete from a different search location. There are tools you can use online to simulate searching from a different area, including this one from BrightLocal.
If you want to rank better, nationally or locally, contact us today.
