How I Check Rankings In 2018

I spent some time checking the rankings for our bloggersSEO site using a VPN and a selection of incognito browsers. The searches threw up a few odd results that made me question the most accurate way of checking rankings.

What I learned

• Ranking checks may be a little different in 2018

• Google’s Ad Preview doesn’t return localised organic results

• StewArt Media showed greater authority than the bloggersSEO search term

• All the major incognito browsers display similar results

• Ranking isn’t decided until someone does the search

Video Transcript

Hey, welcome back, Rankers. Super Bowl’s on this morning and Australians are very, very interested, especially if you go and have a look at Google Trends, you can see, yes, there’s a lot of interest there. Go Eagles.

Ranking Checks in 2018

I want to talk to you today about checking your rankings. For instance, you may not recognise this version of Google that I’m using, but I’m actually using Google, I’m not using Google Chrome, I’m using Opera Browser and it’s incognito, or private browsing, and for some reason, Google is serving up a version of itself from 2009. I don’t know.

Anyway, the phrase I’m searching for here is: blogger’s SEO system. I’ve got a VPN switched on. The VPN, for those of you playing along at home is the Express VPN using Los Angeles-2. So if you want to check my settings, that’s where we’re at.

‘bloggers SEO system’ and we’re finding that it’s number one worldwide, which is great, that’s what we were targeting. Okay. However, when we just go and have a look at the brand, bloggersSEO, and we’re still in L.A., we get, and this is bouncing around this morning, but we get StewArt Media on the front page of Google in L.A.

Now, that shouldn’t happen. Last year, Google changed its results so that if you are inside New York, I know you’re using google.com.au, you will get New York results. You’ll get local results; you won’t get Australian results. And similarly, if you normally use Google.com and then you come to Australia, you will get Australian results in Google.com. So we can’t use the tools like Google’s Ad Preview anymore because it’s only useful for previewing ads, which is what it was designed for. It doesn’t give you localised results in the country in the organics that you are searching for, so that’s why we use a VPN and we go incognito. That’s Opera Private Browsing Tab.

Then we go across to Google Chrome Private Browsing. Type in ‘bloggersSEO system’ and you can see down here it’s telling us it’s L.A. We’re getting similar results in New York and Denver and Texas and … but if you are in the U.S., please, I’d love you to check some of these especially bloggersSEO, which is the brand, right?

So, initially, when the site launched it was on page two or something like that, it’s dropped back to page two and then StewArt Media has come on to page one, which shouldn’t happen. I haven’t been trying to rank StewArt Media for bloggersSEO-related phrases. Now to give you a little bit of background, StewArt Media, there is one blog post, or maybe two blog posts, that link to bloggersSEO.com and there is probably a bunch, you know, maybe one or two links of bloggersSEO linking back to StewArt Media.

How Accurate is Rank Checking on a VPN?

But, really StewArt Media should not have the authority. If we can ring number one globally for bloggersSEO system and Google says yes, that’s it, which is what we’re trying to rank for because bloggers need a system to do SEO. So it’s step-by-step, it’s not like you have to learn everything you need to about SEO, it’s about if you go to a WordPress site this is how you do SEO on that site.

I would think bloggersSEO would also rank there, but it does not and we’re getting similar results in Firefox Private Browsing and also Safari Private Browsing using a VPN.

I would love to know what you’re seeing. I’ve asked some mates in the U.K. and they’ve given us some interesting results wide and varied, but I wasn’t sure whether all of them were doing it incognito. Certainly, Judith DeCabbit-Lewis was, thank you Judith Decabbit who checked for me bloggersSEO, and she found that on incognito we were number ten in the U.K. I certainly checked using the VPN that’s getting similar results there.
So I’d like to know how accurate this particular way of checking your rankings is.

Of course, we’ve also got things like Rank Ranger, where it is monitoring the ranking and all the rest of it. That’s great, but, of course, ranking isn’t decided until someone does the search. Until someone requests the page because that ranking is dependent on who is doing the search, where they’re doing the search and when they’re doing the search.

That’s all for this week. Oh, incidentally, if you have not got your Amazon eBook yet, you can download it from the link below. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.

Free eBook Download