Why you shouldn’t Google yourself
Did you realize that Google personalizes your search results? Personalized search results mean that any search you make is skewed by your physical location, browsing history, and what you regularly search for you’re put into audience segments.
Table of Contents
Your Audience Segments
Generally speaking, Google uses approximately 6 types of Audience Segments to classify searchers and help better tailor search results.
- Affinity: Reach users based on what they’re passionate about and their habits and interests.
- Custom segments: Depending on your campaign goal, reach users based on what they’re passionate about, their habits and interests. Also reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
- Detailed Demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
- Life Events: Reach users when they are in the midst of important life milestones.
- In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
- Your data segments: Reach users that have interacted with your business.
- Website and app visitors: Reach people who have visited your website and/or apps.
- Customer Match: Reach your existing customers based on your CRM data.
- Similar segments: Reach new users with similar interests to your website visitors or existing customers.
Your Physical Location
Google uses your physical location to *tailor the search results, giving weight to businesses near you–more often than not.
Your proximity to your service area will skew the results you see for your own search terms.
Your Browsing History
To ensure you get the best search results, Google will prioritize sites you’ve visited before. Since you’ve visited your own site, Google will serve your own url to you in relation to the search term.
All of this information is used not only in advertising but also in their search algorithm to personalize your search results, which is why if you search for yourself to see your site rankings, you’ll never get a clear picture of how well you’re ranking and what your SEO efforts are producing. It’s important to use neutral data to evaluate your SEO efforts.
How to get neutral search results using Google search
- Delete all cookies and disable browser cookies
- Restart your browser (use Firefox if you usually use Chrome)
- Use Firefox’s “private mode”
- Open “https://startpage.com/” or a similar private search engine
- Disable Google’s Personal Web Search by adding the parameter “&pws=0″ to the URL
How to check page rank for a specific keyword
Free Google Rank Checkers
If you’re not working with an SEO agency, there are several free Google rank checkers. Below are a few of my favorites.
How to find keywords that bring your website traffic
If you want to determine which keywords bring traffic to your website, I suggest using Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a free tool that will uncover your organic page rankings by query/search term.