What's with measuring search rank?
-
Okay, here 6 different ways to measure search rank on Google U.S. and I get 6 different answers:
Looking for search term "Lunch Bags" for the site Zappos (just a random example - no connection to me).
SEOMOZ RankTracker - #49
SEOCentro - #36
http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html
ZendProxy.com - #21
(an anonymizer proxy)
anonymouse.org - no rank
(another anonymizer)
Mikes Marketing Tools - no rank
http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/
RankingCheck.com - #38
Can you duplicate a similar variation?
What gives?
Which if any of these would you rely on?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Darcy,
I'm going through a process at the moment of a very thorough analysis of every tool I can get my hands on - more from a technical perspective because I was getting sick of the varying results from different tools / utilities.
I wrote my own scraper utility to get live results from Google as well. I tested 800 keywords using broad, phrase, exact, etc and the results from Google compared to every tool out there is different.
I'm currently writing a document on all of this. Maybe I should post it somewhere, I don't know, but my strong feelings at this point is:
-
check with each provider (of the online tool or downloadable software) whether they use broad match, phrase match, or exact match. SEM Rush displays results for "phrase match" but shows [exact match] search volume for that phrase. You almost need a database to remember what criteria each tool uses to return results.
-
do they allow you to filter results by domain (google.com, google.com.au, etc)?
-
in addition to the above, do they allow you to filter results by only showing results for that country (eg, if you can select "Australia", do they search on google.com.au AND give you the choice to see results for only .com.au domains, or all results that google.com.au would offer up?)
-
How recent is their data? Everything costs money - whether it's in API units from Google, API units from a competing tool, or even time and money spent on writing their own scraping software. Free tools aren't going to update their databases every day. SEOMoz (who I've found to be quite accurate) updates their Keyword Analysis Tool database monthly. A lot can happen in 4 weeks. Getting this information can be tough. You need to email each vendor and get their answer - and then trust their answer.
-
Tough one... but how savvy is the developer of the tool? I've written my own tools and it's damn hard to get accurate data even from Google directly! There's so many variables. Poorly written software returns poor results. In writing my own stuff, different proxies would return different Google results, even different user agents (web browsers) would return different results. You need a thorough understanding of the technicalities behind obtaining data from or about Google.
There's a few considerations off the top of my head. As I say I'm still putting together my findings. I'm using this reply as an opportunity to hopefully spark a little discussion on this as I think many people have the same problem.
The immediate solution? Write your own software, or use a few tools and average the results. I'm quite the analyst so varying results do my head in. However at the same time, is your goal to get 100% accurate results, or get a good "feel" for the competitive landscape and move on? Sometimes I like to get things perfect, other times my client doesn't have the time to wait, and I'm not paid enough to be that anal!
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking issues with my local business website.
Hi, I have local business website "asapgaragedoorrepair.com" which im seeing weird ranking issues during last few months . i would like to share it with you guys and get help from you. first days i have indexed the website ,it was ranking good with google and then after 2-3 weeks i have noticed that none of the pages ranking anymore. i have looked for any issues in the optimization and i fixed them and indexed again. right now i have weird issues. 1- the website was ranking for another page in my website other that the one that i wanted for keyword" Garage Door Repair Pasadena " .(it was ranking with garage door installation page). i changed the content ,optimization on the other page and indexed. still the same issue. then i had no ways other that 301 to the right page . 2- when i check the rankings with "ahrefs" website or "Moz" or other tools that i have, it shows that im ranking for 16th position for " Garage door repair Pasadena ". but when i search it by myself im getting no results. (this is bothering) maybe i dont know something . pls help me 3- in Moz or ahref website shows the ranking like the image i have attached. 2 different results for each keywords. why is that? and why i can not see them when i search them by my self? htPQR
Moz Pro | | Mishel2980 -
Moz reporting incorrect ranking
Moz is reporting no ranking on one of my keywords, but when I search that keyword on Google we are on the first page. What would cause Moz to report that incorrectly?
Moz Pro | | SpearOne0 -
Search Traffic Declining
Hello, My search engine traffic has been declining recently - I saw one decline last August and another this past April. I'm trying to figure out what caused the decline and would love advice on where I should start digging. Any recommendations would really help me! Thanks in advance. Jodi momsfavoritestuff.com
Moz Pro | | JodiFTM0 -
SEO Moz Rank Report
Anyone else noticing the rank reporting seems to be off? My reports are showing "not in top 50" for some keywords that my site is on page one for. Not in places listings either because I know that can throw things off! Anyone?
Moz Pro | | RickyShockley0 -
Historical search engine results
is there any tool that can be used to view search engine results on a given day in history for a particular term?
Moz Pro | | matmox0 -
Tool which shows site ranking for a given keyword
Hi all. I have a client with a specific request and wanted to ask if there is a reliable tool which allows a user to enter a given site and keyword, and it will return the site's ranking for that keyword. More specifically: Needs to work for Google, Yahoo and Bing Needs to work for various countries such as Google.ca, Google.it, etc. Needs to show at least the top ?10k rankings, not just the top 50 The last requirement is the challenge. I clearly recognize anything past the top 50 or so ranks is really off the map, but the client would like to view his current standings.
Moz Pro | | RyanKent0 -
Where in SEOMoz pro can I determine how many .edu and .gov links a competitor's site has?
Like in the SEOBook toolbar where you can click the information button and get the number of links to the domain and specific page for .edu and .gov sites. Thanks, Daniel.
Moz Pro | | iSenseWebSolutions0 -
Site is penalized yet Google WTC and SEOMOZ says it's ok!
My first question on this community.. A high traffic site of mine has been severely hit for over two months. I took a look at GWTC and noticed a lot of suggestions on the HTML suggestions tab, where I believed that one or a combination of these errors/notices might been causing the penalty. At the moment of typing GWTC shows no HTML suggestions and minor meaningless crawl errors. Checking on SEOMOZ reported issues, I see zero errors except for a high number of duplicate page titles resulting from tag pages being accessible in the same tag title in paginations (tag.html?page=x) which can be fixed easily by using rel=canonical but I just know it can't cause such penalty. For reported warnings, site has a decent amount of title element being too long and missing meta tag description tags. I have been very active in the past with 301 inner pages of the site to make pages URLs as unique as possible and results were great, but that was long time ago before taking the hit. The penalty the site suffers from is zero rankings for newly added contents and old contents as well. It has also lost all rankings for its money terms. Site is not banned and still ranking top for its name which is a good thing. I am not sure where else I should be looking and will appreciate any good advices. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | HossamHossny0