My site is ranked in the top 5 for my keywords, but howcome I'm low in an organic search results for my key words?

[allstatetransmission]

Are the other factors such as page rank, Alexa rating and mozRank used to determine where I will show up in search results, over Goggle's key word rank for my key words?

[RobertFisher]

OK Jeff, what are the urls associated with these? These are where you are ranking, you have to remember that if you are not using non personalized search it will be different on your machine it will be different for you than on moz

[allstatetransmission]

I was getting the Google key word ranking info from my seoMOZ campaign report. I copied these words and the Google rank from the report.

phoenix transmission                    3

phoenix transmission repair        1

phoenix transmission shop          1

phoenix transmission shops        3

phoenix transmissions                   4

I guess I thought that if I ranked at a certain number for the key words that that would be where I landed in a search for these words

[RobertFisher]

Don't worry about me Steve; the therapist said I will mend. It just takes time.......

[SteveOllington]

lol sorry I see what you mean now, I'd taken it out of context a bit there instead of leaving it as comparable to the other items in the question. My bad.

[RobertFisher]

Oh Steve I am hurt by this...

What I am saying is that since PR is a factor that is established based on Linking, relevance, QDF, etc. it will be most important on the whole predicated on the question asked. (If he works on quality content, quality linking, etc. will his page rank rise or not?)  I did not say focus on PR and do not want to leave that conclusion. Let PR rise as it will with you taking care of all that affects it.

With an individual page at a moment in time, there will be other factors: recent page with a lot of traffic, etc. will often outrank other older higher PR pages. A page that is a local business that has a highly optimized Places listing will very often outrank a higher PR page without.

Also, with the question he asked it was about googles key word ranking versus serps:

are other factors such as page rank, Alexa rating and mozRank used to determine where I will show up in search results, over Goggle's key word rank for my key words?

I am thinking that he may be looking at a couple of things: he may be on one of the sites that uses the term Google in their url but are not really Google and give keyword rankings. Since I am unaware of a keyword ranking system other than a page ranking for a given keyword query, it makes me scratch my head.

So, I hope I have extricated myself from the PR is all dilemma.

Best to you

[Nick_Ker]

Agree with Steve - PR is probably not what you should focus on as it is one of hundreds of factors, rarely updated and has little to do with how you rank for specific keywords.  Plenty of PR 0 or 1 sites rank very highly for their target keywords.

With that out of the way, maybe we need some clarification.  You say your site ranks in the top 5 for your keywords, but your are low in organic results.  How are you determining how your site ranks?  Just checking in a browser can yield inaccurate results since Google will use location, and your personal search and browsing history (if you haven't turned it off, and maybe even if you have turned it off) to determine what to show you.

Do you mean you are ranking in the top 5 of search results for your keywords, but not seeing the expected traffic?  If that is the case, take a good look at your page titles and meta descriptions.  Make sure they read nicely to people, and aren't just a bunch of keywords.  It may be that you are ranking well, but the results don't stand out from the competition enough for users to click through to the site.

[SteveOllington]

"There are several determinants for where you will rank in Google SERP's, but the most important is PR." <-- I've gotta disagree on that

Yeah it counts but relevance counts a lot more than just juice.

Decent content + promotional effort = quantity & quality of links (combined with the decent content) = rankings.

I wouldn't think too much on the PR or you might get sidetracked into thinking about that, more than thinking about the above

[RobertFisher]

There are several determinants for where you will rank in Google SERP's, but the most important is PR. When you say Google's keyword rank what do you mean? Alexa shows traffic and there is not a corollary per se to where you will rank. mozRank will be closer to PR than anything I am aware of.

The other issues will be recent traffic to page, local optimization as applicable, competitiveness of the vertical, etc.

Best