Search results are constantly changing, and Rank Tracker shows you a results once per day, so your business may not always appear exactly where Rank Tracker shows. There are a few things to remember:
1. You could be seeing personalized results.
Google knows which sites you have visited and will rank those higher if it sees you tend to visit them often. To make sure you’re seeing non-personalized results, you can try using a private browser.
2. What location did you enter in your campaign?
Rankings will vary drastically depending on where you search from. You could move one street over and see different rankings.
If you did not include a zip code in your location, Rank Tracker marks your search area as the center of your city, and will likely return different results than if you entered your business' zip code, or the zip code you're searching from.
There is a eyeball icon beside each keyword in your campaign results. If you click this, it will show you the Google search results for that keyword, from the search area entered into your campaign at the time we searched. This is helpful to view all search results if you're not located in the same city or zip code as the business you're tracking and for competitor analysis.
3. We don’t include the local pack when we count the rank in organic results.
The Local Pack results come from a completely different database and are ranked by a completely different algorithm, so we count them separately. The blue links are organic and there aren't more than 10 per page.
4. Google Algorithm Changes
Google frequently changes their search algorithm which could result in ranking changes. If you see a jump, up or down, you may just have to wait a couple of days to see if the rankings normalize. When analyzing rankings we should always be looking at trends rather than one specific ranking point.
5. Business Hours
If your business is closed and competitors are open then they may outrank you at that point in time. This could vary from if a search is performed when you are both marked as open.
In order to combat this we have added a feature that allows you to set the crawl time of your campaigns.
For more info on setting crawl time see this article.
It is important to keep in mind that it is nearly impossible to validate ranking data. Ranking results are constantly in flux based on many factors including, but not limited to, browser, device, time, location, and search history. Each rank tracker will report the rankings based on all of these factors which cannot be duplicated 100%.
Instead of obsessing over specific ranking points we should view the value of rank tracking as monitoring trends over time and finding opportunities for improvement in certain regions or for certain search terms.