Matching Your Search Engine Optimisation Results With Your Providers

Data lies at the heart of an SEO‘s job. It allows measurement, tactical planning, and pragmatic revision. Just as importantly it provides the means for a client to judge the success and performance of an SEO campaign. On a fundamental level it is the relevant organic traffic from benchmark keyword rankings that matters to the majority of my clients. There are other sets of data that matter, but this one is usually the core goal.

Sometimes it can be that purely building relevance for a brand new domain and site is the immediate goal. Sometimes it can be successfully devolving one brand/domain into another, and sometimes it could be promoting a domain for an emergent market. Whatever the goal, data is used as the measure, so it makes sense that performance is judged by all parties with the same criteria. Nothing unusual so far then.

What is unusual is the quiet adoption of personal search. I use the word “quiet” as people just get on  and use it. Logging in to iGoogle or any other Google account for many users is just part of their desktop regime, there’s no need to shout about it. Except that it can cause problems.

If I regularly review how my competitors are performing in the SERPs and I’m logged in to Google my results are going to end up being skewed by personal search. That’s what personal search does, it influences the results you see, based on what you’ve searched before. If I constantly check how some site is doing for a keyword, that site is going to get shunted up my personal search SERPs. Now, let’s go back to the earlier blurb about data.

If I only use personal search my data will be skewed, and it won’t match what my SEO provider is telling me. If there’s a mismatch there’s a problem, and sometimes its the tiny problems that can have a profound effect- maybe even on the trust-relationship you have with your SEO.

To avoid any hassles take the old adage “never mix business and pleasure” and apply it to your searching. By remaining logged out of Google when you do competitive searches you will be getting the same data as everyone else.