You're Not Ranking Where You Think You Are

You're Not Ranking Where You Think You Are

The Final Code

Local SEO What you see What they see

You did it this morning, did you not. Typed your own thing into Google, on your own computer, in your own office, and there you were. Third. Not bad. We do SEO for companies in Ventura County, and this is the number people quote at us more than any other.

That number is fiction. Not a little bit off. Fiction. And once you see why, you will stop trusting it and start checking properly, which takes about four minutes.

You are the worst possible person to check your own rankings

Not because you are careless. Because Google has spent years learning who you are and where you are, and it is trying very hard to be helpful to you specifically. Which is wonderful when you are looking for a taco and useless when you are trying to find out what a stranger sees.

You are searching from your own office, which is the one address on earth closest to your own business. You are logged into an account that has clicked your own website a few hundred times. You are on the desk machine rather than the phone your customer is holding. Every one of those tilts the page in your favor.

What you see

From your office, logged in, on the desktop
"pool service ventura"

  1. A national directory
  2. A competitor
  3. You
  4. Another competitor
  5. Somebody in Oxnard

Third. You tell your wife you are third.

What your customer sees

Nine miles away, on a phone, never heard of you
"pool service ventura"

  1. A national directory
  2. A competitor
  3. Another competitor
  4. Somebody in Oxnard
  5. A guy with 40 reviews

You are on page two. You have never once seen this page.

Google publishes the list

This is not a conspiracy and it is not a secret. Google has a help page explaining why two people searching the same words get different pages back.

"If you search pizza in a particular city, you get results relevant to that location."

Google Search Help, why your Search results differ from others

And location is only one of six things on their list. Here is the whole set, in plain words.

Where you areThe single biggest one for a local business, and the one nobody controls for. Results move between towns. They move across a town.
When you lookedGoogle says new content goes in shortly after it is published, so people searching minutes apart can see different pages.
What you searched beforeClick your own site enough times and Google learns you like it. It is being polite. It is also lying to you.
What you are holdingPhone results and desktop results are built differently, and your customer is almost always on the phone.
What language you useMatters more here than most people assume, in a county where plenty of searching happens in Spanish.
Who you areSome results get personalized from your account, some do not, and you cannot tell which is which from the inside.

So the rank you have been quoting is your rank, in your chair, on your machine, in your town. It is a real number. It is just a number about you, and you were never the customer.

How to check it properly, in four minutes

Do this instead of what you did this morning

  1. Get out of your own account. A private window is the floor, not the ceiling. It removes the history, not the location.
  2. Use the phone, on cell data. Turn the office wifi off. Your customer is not on your network and the phone results are not the desktop results.
  3. Move. Genuinely. Drive to the far edge of where you actually take work and search from there. That is where the customer you are missing is standing.
  4. Search the way a customer talks, not the way your industry writes. Nobody types your service category the way it appears on your invoices.
  5. Write down what you see, including who is above you. Names, not positions. Positions move, and a name tells you who to go look at.

Four minutes, no tools, no subscription. And if the answer you get from the far side of town is different from the one you got this morning, you have learned something more useful than any report.

Why this bites local businesses hardest

A company selling software to the whole country has one results page to worry about. You have one for every town you serve, and they do not agree with each other.

Which is also why the honest version of a rankings report has a place attached to it. A number without a location is not a ranking, it is a mood. If somebody has been sending you a single position for a single term with no mention of where it was measured from, that is worth a conversation.

It is also the quiet reason so many owners think their SEO is working when it is not, and occasionally the reverse: we have met people convinced they were invisible who were sitting at the top for the searches that actually mattered, two towns over, and had simply never looked from there.

What to do with what you find

If you are lower than you thought, you are not worse off than you were yesterday. You are just holding a real number now instead of a flattering one, which is the only kind you can act on.

The next question is who is above you and why, and we wrote the honest list of reasons in why does my competitor outrank me. If the answer turns out to be that they have a page for the town and you do not, that is a different fix and it has its own rules.

This is the same work behind our local SEO engagements and the wider SEO program they sit in. You can see what it looked like for a pool service company here in the county in the Primary Pools story.

If you are in Ventura County

Try it between Ventura and Camarillo, or Ojai and Oxnard. Same search, twenty minutes apart in the car. Most owners have never done this and most are surprised, usually somewhere around the second stop.

Or let us show you theirs

Send us the website and the towns you actually want work from. We will run the searches from each of them, the way a customer would, and show you where you really sit, who is above you and what it would take to move. Free, no contract, and it is yours either way.

Get My Free Visibility Report Or call or text 805.243.8321