Google Ranking Check – Tips and Tricks

ByDr.-Ing. Erik Neitzel
Google Ranking Check – Tips and Tricks

We have often said here on our SEO blog that you should have your keywords constantly checked in order to effectively improve your Google website ranking. We have also already discussed which types of SEO ranking check are available to you. In this article we approach the question of how such a Google ranking check could look in concrete terms. To do this, we will primarily look at what it depends on.

Ranking checks in general

Checking the placement of your keyword rankings is not trivial.

It should be noted that every modern search engine has its results:

  • in a cache so that the search results are never entirely up-to-date
  • depending on the location of your IP address, so that even a ranking check via VPN or proxy may provide you with different search results than checking the actual country whose website you are in charge of SEO
  • can change by leaps and bounds, which makes regular checking of the rankings essential

So you always do well not to have the rankings carried out manually and occasionally, but automatically and regularly. This is the only way to ensure that you have a clear picture of the current ranking situation for the keywords on your website.

Ranking Check in general

Ranking is the result of a multitude of criteria against slightly different websites with very different ratings

Google ranking checks in particular

The search engine Google is extremely good at every discipline of analyzing a website. It is not for nothing that it is the most popular and by far the most widely used search engine in the world. From crawling a website to understanding its structure and its content classification to the qualitative comparison of different websites that address the same topic, Google is technically very mature.

But above all, you must understand one thing: Providing high-quality search results is above all a creative task in the development of the algorithm required for this. Like no other search engine, Google will surprise you very often.

This can manifest itself in different ways, for example:

  • Extremely erratic ranking changes that Google carries out to test the user acceptance of a newly ranked page
  • Very late inclusion of single-word keywords in relation to relatively quick rankings for long-tail keywords due to a potential lack of thematic relevance
  • Different ranking weighting of search terms with high search volume compared to keywords with low monthly search volume
  • Strongly delayed ranking improvements for the first two result pages for keywords with high SEO competition
  • Unforeseen dependencies of the search results on hidden elements of your search query

So you are well advised not to look forward to an extraordinarily good ranking too early. But at the same time you shouldn’t underestimate your website, which has only been moderately ranking so far. It all depends on a preliminary research on the keywords to which your website can actually contribute something that is of added value for your visitors.

User in front of search engine

For Google, search results must match the user as precisely as possible

Derived tips on the subject of placement checks

From this preliminary consideration, we want to derive a few guidelines for you about which points can be important for you to carry out your ranking checks. Because you should not only check the search term rankings of your website on Google regularly, but above all classify the results correctly.

Ranking measurement process and knowledge of the specific keywords

First of all, only the course of a ranking over time, combined with a solid understanding of the specific keyword you are concerned with (length of the search term, search volume, competing websites) can serve as the basis for the correct conclusions for any SEO optimization to pull. Two keyword ranking combinations can never be lumped together. Everything depends on your research, so that the determined keywords match your SEO possibilities and you don’t go to the ranking checks with distorted expectations.

The country of the search query should match the country of the target website

What many do not consider when checking their rankings is that foreign tools that set Google.de as the target search engine, however, carry out their ranking checks via, for example, U.S. IP addresses. Such a SERP check cannot always deliver the results that you probably want to know. For example, an American who searches for the word “Karma” on Google.de will always get different results than a German who does the same. Google assumes various demographic preferences here that are not always transparent from the outside.

Variable tests are an advantage

A check at rigidly defined search periods is also not necessarily effective, since Google’s crawler, ranking algorithm and also the result cache also go through the respective website at certain times (preferably at night) in order to determine content and / or technical changes to the page without any Affecting website visitors. The ranking check is therefore always more authentic if the placement check takes place at as irregular times as possible, as it then remains at least statistically unaffected by nightly Google activities.

Google Ranking Check

All tips on the topic of Ranking Check in brief

In summary, we can state for ranking checks:

  • No ranking checks without researching the keywords (length, competitive situation, search volume)
  • No ranking checks of foreign IP addresses for German websites
  • No checks at fixed times, but daily checks at different times

If you take these points to heart, the results of your ranking tests correspond much more to what they actually deserve on the SEO side – and hopefully also to what you would actually expect. In any case, they then fit in with your SEO efforts in relation to the overall structure of target country, keyword length, search volume and competition that is specific to the topic of your keyword.

Let us see that we are referring to our SERPBOT as a Google ranking tool, which takes all of the points mentioned for German keywords to heart. It only checks German servers and checks the rankings of your keywords for an unlimited number of domain projects every day at unspecified times.

We wish you the best of luck with your SEO projects!

Dr.-Ing. Erik Neitzel