Checking keyword rankings
-
I have 2 questions:
1. To check keyword rankings with firefox, i am choosing:
Tools>Options>Privacy>"clear all current history"
Timerange to clear: Everything
Check Boxes: Browsing and download history, form and search history, cookies, cache, active logins
Is there anything else I need to be doing?
2. Search results in my Niche are heavily localized. Is there any way to check rankings in another area? Ex: By default, our rankings are for Northeast NJ. Is there any way to check Baltimore, for example?
-
Even setting your location and cleaning your cache will not show the same results from a person that is actually in that location. Google uses SEVERAL factors, including ip addresses.
I would suggest you open an incognito window / private window and then use a proxy/VPN provider to set your IP address as from that location, for example HMA (paid, but cheap).
Hope that helps.
-
Hi Rahul,
Your first step for clearing your cache and browsing history is spot-on; this way, you ensure you are working with a clean slate for your searches.
For your second question, changing your location in the “search tools” feature on Firefox will indeed allow you to check rankings for your site in the location of your choice. As well, the Bright Local Search Rank Checker has a free trial where you can look up a maximum of ten terms at a time in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to determine efficient keyword rankings in locations of your choice. Using both these tools in tandem will help give the most accurate information for your search results and ranking.
-
Your doing everything right in clearing your cookies and making sure you are logged out of your Google account.
To change your search location simply click on the "search tools" button and you should see your city. If you click on that city you'll be able to enter another location and switch between them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(
Hello, I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either. Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada). My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41). I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer) The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
Home page ranks for most keywords with no SEO
Hi Guys, The keyword I am trying to rank is on seperate page with its own Optimization in place. However the HOME page of website starts ranking for that keywords . The keyword is mentioned on Home page Just once in content description, that's all. What should be my ideal strategy. Deleting the Sub Page, will that improve the SEO of my home page and improve the Rank for that keyword ? Also I can see my Own YELP pages rank better than the actual website for few terms . Any way around this ? A Part from building links to page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00071 -
Will multiple domains from the same company rank for the same keyword search?
I'm trying to convince people that we need good marketing reasons for starting multiple domains, as it will be more difficult to rank multiple sites. Does anyone know if Google actively discourages multiple domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same keyword? We are creating a separate content website which is related to an existing company website. Would you agree that is best to have these sites on one domain with the content site on a sub-domain perhaps? I'm worried about duplication of effort and cross-keyword targeting in particular. These sites would not have duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
Rank on specific Google
Hi folks, a website is hosted with a TLD like .com in the USA. The content etc. is obviously all english but now we want to focus on a specific Google like .co.uk What must be necessarily be done to rank better? Is it enough just to buy a .co.uk domain and set the nameserver up or do we need to get a british hosting? Thanks in advance. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KillAccountPlease0 -
Keyword Significance
I am seeing some very interesting changes in our non-branded keywords, and am curious to know how keyword significance in Google Webmaster Tools plays into ranking of a site. Say for example we are a photography website selling photography supplies. At one point our most significant word was Canon, but now it is photography. Would that mean that we would start seeing a lot of non-branded keywords generating from Google like "camera strap", "camera lens hood", etc. This is really good for us, but curious to know if the only reason we are seeing this is the shift in our keyword significance. Any insight? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaHoku0