What’s Your Real Search Engine Rank?

- November 7, 2013

At this moment, there are approximately 2,095,006,005 living humans with internet connectivity, and those 2.1 billion humans make more than a billion Google searches daily. It’s a common misconception that all 2.1 billion of those humans see the same results for the same keywords. In truth, search personalization has an enormous impact on search engine rankings.

Only about 36% of small businesses invest in publishing and analytics tools. The rest, presumably, are trying to improve search engine rankings and checking their results simply by running a Google search on their own. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are search engine rank checkers available through many analytics tools, but they don’t do much good for those without access. If you don’t have search engine rank checker, there are still a few ways to check your rank without the influence of personalization.

Method One: Sign Out

Make sure you’re signed out of Gmail and then change your location to your target area. Open a new window or tab for www.google.com every time you enter a new search term in order to make sure that previous searches aren’t muddling your new ones. If you’re tracking your ranking results progress, always simulate the conditions of your initial check. Use the same location and browser every time.

Method Two: Incognito Mode

In Chrome, you can press Ctrl+Shift+N to open a new incognito window. Firefox and IE also have similar modes. What they do is remove cookies that drive personalized search. Like you did in the sign out method, be sure to open Google in a new tab each time you search and replicate conditions when tracking progress.

Method Three: Manipulate SERP URL

After you’ve pressed the “search” button, add “andpws=0” to the end of your results page URL. For example, if I had searched “search engine rank checker,” I would change the URL from http://www.google.com/search?q=search+engine+rank+checker to http://www.google.com/search?q=search+engine+rank+checkerandpws=0.

Knowing where you’re ranking is essential to measuring the success of your optimization efforts. After all, users are drawn to organic, high ranking results, choosing them over sponsored results 70% of the time. To see where you’re stacking up, use these methods to get the real scoop on where you rank on important keywords.