When Google is not what it seems
Much has been made of Google's move to personalized results. Whether you're logged in or not logged in, Google has been personalizing results based on your activities. This is news to the innocent bystander, but certainly not to SEOs. So I won't go too far into that. If you want to learn more about the technicalities and ramifications of personalized search, I would recommend that you try this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html
But let's talk about something bigger here. As an SEO you might be running some rank checking software and seeing that your site is pulling down some top rankings in Google for a certain keyword, but it doesn't seem to be turning into traffic from an analytics standpoint. Traditionally, you'd think that you should change your page title, or possibly adjust your description to give you a more attractive SERP. That type of thinking was in line with the idea that results were universal (non-personalized results, which will STILL be the vast majority of searches in the near future) from sea to shining sea. Turns out, there's more customizations going on than you know.
Let's take the case of Dave Kahle for example. Dave Kahle is a sales training professional based in Comstock Park, Michigan. Taking a look through some of the SERPs, I find that his site is currently ranked 3rd for the terms sales workshops and sales seminars.
I'm not making this stuff up.
So you'd naturally think that based on the Google keyword tool's information, and AOL's SERP data you would think that the site would be getting about 40 clicks for sales workshops and about 200 for sales seminars based on its third place standing. I, however would wager it doesn't quite reach that level. Why?
Well, I'm searching in Lansing, Michigan and Google knows that. Trying a little experiment using SEOMoz's rank tracker tool I found last week that Dave Kahle's site was ranking 6th and 9th for these terms. Why would that be? Well, SEOMoz's tool displays a West Coast bias, as their physical location is in Seattle. So their tool displays rankings as they would from that location. Apparently Google has made a bit of a distinction between the relevance of these services to a West Coast audience.
So next time you start wondering why traffic doesn't seem to be accompanying your rankings, here's another tool in the toolbox to help explain why. Try to find a surrogate rank checking tool based in a different geography to test the consistency of your rankings.
Update: I began writing this blog last week, but it appears the West Coast rankings have nearly caught up. Good for Dave, but bad for my example. Try this yourself and let me know what types of drastically different results you can find.
Tags: anomalies is search results, localized search results, localized SERPs, personalized search, ranking high but no traffic, weird search results
