Google is a personal experience
Have you ever noticed that Google Search Console (GSC), or the analytics programs that you attach to it, always seems to say one thing about your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings, but when you go to look up those same terms on Google, you always seem to get vastly different results? This is because the SERPs that you see are affected by who you are. Your GPS location, language, browser settings, and search history all affect your own personal SERPs, but GSC ranks keywords based on an average across all users on the internet.
The problem is that these values are completely useless for SEO because over 90% of all “impressions” are not actually seen by anyone and have less than a 1% chance of being clicked. If all Google users had the same average experience on Google, then this would not be a problem. Unfortunately, what you really see are 2 main statistical cohorts emerge where one small group of users are those that are in your service area where it decides it should recommend your business to them and then there is everyone else who is too far away; so, they will get delivered a separate list of companies that do what you do, but are much closer to them.
Why does this make Google Search Console harmful for SEO?
Let’s say you own a Pizza Shop in New York. You do not need to know about how you show up for people in California who search for “Pizza Shop” because they will never buy your Pizza no matter how you rank for them, and Google knows better than to show your Pizza shop to them anyway. Unfortunately, GSC does not make this distinction, so even if you show up as #1-3 for the hundreds of impressions you got from local searches, across the whole internet, you might average #50 because there are also thousands of “impressions” that are so far down that nobody actually sees them.
When you do statistics like this where you average a bunch of irrelevant data into a small amount of relevant data, you get outcomes that are irrelevant to the information you are looking for. In fact, the best way to bring that rank #50 up is not to improve your SEO, but to make it worse so that all of your non sequitur impressions fall out of the data set. So, what a lot of SEO companies do is they change things around or let AI rewrite everything until the non sequitur users all fall out of the top 100 list, and then their average SERPs might pop up to #10… unfortunately, this means that those top few people who Google thinks are good matches for you are all now showing up at #9-11 instead of #1-3, so you will see your actual conversions bottom out even though you’ve improved your average.
This often makes Google Search Console’s data utterly useless for the average small business because you so often appear to be ranking very poorly when you are doing well, and you appear to be doing well, even when you are doing very poorly.
How Pros SEO, when Google is working against them
Unfortunately, Google Search Console does not have any good filters for getting realistic SERPs and all the top SEO analytics tools out there either give a nebulous “SEO score” with no real relation to your SERPs, or they use GSC’s faulty data to give you a ranking that is corrupted by large amounts of non sequitur data parameters. This leaves most SEO companies confidently misguided about how well they are actually targeting your search terms in your service area(s). The only real way to know if your SERPs are doing well is to check them yourself… unfortunately, like I said at the beginning, Google Search results are different for everyone. For example, if you try to do a Google search for “pizza shop” right now, you will get these results. However, if you wanted to see how pizza shops rank in New York City, you would need to create a special link like this one that tells Google to pretend that you are in New York. But even doing that, your results may be skewed by your own personal Google Search history. So if you go to your own website a lot, you may see your site rank higher than it does for other people because that is the site Google expects you to go to; so, you also need to make sure to tell Google to pretend that it does not know anything about you when you check your SERPs. So if you do a search like this, you will see exactly what Google will show the average user located in New York City who searches for “Pizza Shop” instead of it trying to guess what site you would personally prefer.
SEO providers that understand Local SEO like this use these sorts of parameterized Google Searches to bypass the bad data generated by Google Search Console, and fine-tune their website’s SEO to outcompete the so-called top SEO companies and drive more real customers to your local business.