People really love to check their search rankings. Many companies
want to use this as a measurement of SEO progress over time, but it is a
bit problematic for a variety of reasons. Here is a summary of the major
problems with rank checking:Google results are not consistent:
Different geographies (even in different cities within the
United States) often give different results.
Different data centers give different results (and you can
hit multiple data centers from a single location at different
times).
Results are personalized for logged-in users based on their
search histories.
No rank checker can monitor and report all of these
inconsistencies (at least, not without scraping Google hundreds of
times from all over the world with every possible setting).
The Google API rarely matches up to what anyone sees in the
search results:
It appears to match up only on very heavily trafficked,
consistent search results—anything mid-tail or long tail is
invariably inaccurate.
It is extremely slow to update, so even though news results
or geographic results might be mixed in (or even new sites or
pages that have a large amount of recent link growth), the API
won’t update for days or sometimes weeks.
Obsessing over rankings (rather than traffic) can result in poor
strategic decisions:
When sites obsess over rankings for particular keywords,
they often spend much more time and energy on a few particular
keyphrases that produce far less value than if they had spent
those resources on the site overall.
Long tail traffic is very often 70% to 80% of the demand,
and it is much easier to rank in the long tail and get valuable
traffic from the long tail than to concentrate on the few rankings
at the top of the demand curve.
So, indulge your desire to check rankings by going to the search
engine and typing in a few queries, but be sure to also keep an eye on
your visitor and conversion statistics.
