Why your Google ranking is not the one your customer sees

You search for your trade and your town, you see yourself in second place, and your colleague swears you are seventh. Nobody is lying. Google simply does not show the same page to two different people.

Three things move your position

Your location is by far the strongest factor on service queries. Five kilometres apart, the ranking changes, even when the town is not typed.

Your history. If you visit your own site fifteen times a day, Google knows. Your page will look better placed to you than it is to a stranger.

Your device. Mobile results differ from desktop, especially when a local pack pushes organic results far down the screen.

Private browsing is not enough

A private window clears cookies and history, but not your IP address: Google still knows roughly where you are. You remove one variable out of three and believe you have a neutral measurement.

That is exactly what a tracking tool does differently: it queries Google from a fixed point, same language, same country, same device, at the same time every day. Read next: choosing keywords when you are a local business, or see what the tool does.