Why Am I Seeing Different Ranking Results?

I obsess over rankings and I know they all say traffic and conversions are the most important metric, Seeing your rankings is soar is cool and can be really annoying when you see  yourself doing great for a keyword then when you check at work you get a much lower result.

Even when you are logged out of Google, the results aren’t uniform.

This article outlines the reasons why you see different results.

Geography

• IP address
• Location
• IP (location) match between searcher and website
• Characteristics of country
• Characteristics of City
• Biggest markets in country
• Biggest markets in City
• Popular queries in country
• Popular queries in City
• Primary and secondary languages spoken
• Local listings in country i.e Google Places, Yelp
• Top level domain e.g .co.uk/ .com
• Keyword brand association in the city
• Aggregated social data for your location

Time

• Time of the day
• Time of the week
• Time of the month
• Time of the year

User Behaviour

• Bookmarks
• Times page printed
• Times page emailed
• Search history
• Interactions with the results i.e. refinements made, bounces etc
• Time on page/ mouse position/ how scrolled / types of clicks on page
• Opening links in new windows and tabs
• Closing tabs
• How much usage
• Gaps between usage
• Age and gender
• Ethnicity
• Social background
• Interests
• Number of other results you clicked on after clicking “x”
• Number of other search queries you made after clicking “x”
• Number of queries made on a given topic
• During the same search session the number of times “x” has been clicked on
• Results which you have exited/bounced from the most
• Time the mouse was rested on “x” in the SERP
• Times the preview option was selected
• Number of levels you went into site “x” and time spent in each category, gives indication of not finding what you want rather than exploring
• Time browser left open without any interaction
• Time page left open without any interaction
• Cookies
• Search made on a toolbar
• Number of searches which require fresh results
• Number of people accessing the internet from your location
• Experience of the searcher i.e. basic searchers normally hit the first few results only and never go to the second page.  Is site “x” getting the traffic because of novice users or because after exploring a fair amount of results they were the best option?

Search Engines

• Server which supplied the data
• Data centre which supplied the data
• Search engines re-ranking results
• Search engine experiments
• Search engine algorithm update

Technical

• Type of computer
• Device used to search with
• Operating system specs
• Browser
• Other open applications i.e. Instant Messenger, Reader
• Internet service provider