Business Owners: STOP Googling Your Keywords To See Where You’re Ranked!

There, I said it.

This is probably one of the biggest mistakes that small business owners make. And it’s understandable. It’s perfectly natural, especially if you’re not seeing results immediately from your local SEO campaigns, to want to know what’s going on.

So you turn to your computer or mobile device and begin frantically searching for your keywords to see if your website or GMB listing shows up. This is called “vanity searching.” And what many business owners don’t realize is that this action could hinder results from Google ads, which in turn may affect your local and organic search engine results as well.

When you search for your own ads and don’t click on them (because doing so would cost you money), it drives down your click-through rate (CTR), which is one of the values Google takes into account when assigning a quality score to your ad campaign. If your campaign has a low click-through rate and a low quality score, it results in your ad being shown even less for those targeted keyword searches. Which further drives down impressions and clicks. It’s a vicious cycle…

Also, it’s important to remember that there are many factors Google takes into account when deciding to show an ad or even an organic result for a specific search. Some of which we have no control over, such as the searcher’s location, browser history, or even the device they’re searching on. Just because you conduct a search and don’t see your website, that doesn’t mean that other people searching are getting the same results you are. Google has a complex local algorithm that measures a variety of different things to determine which results are most relevant for which users. That algorithm takes into account hundreds of different data points for every single searcher that uses its platform, and those data points are unique from one person to another. For this reason, what it shows to one user may be completely different from what it shows to another.

Furthermore, when you perform multiple searches repeatedly and don’t click on your ads, Google assumes those ads aren’t relevant to you and that you’re not interested in them, and after awhile you won’t be shown those ads anymore at all. But that doesn’t mean that other users who are performing the same searches aren’t seeing them. We use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool that’s available directly within the Google Ads platform to determine how often your ads are showing. It also provides us with helpful insight into why they may not be showing and what we can do to change that.

Bottom line: it’s best not to rely on your own Google searches to see where you’re ranked since these can vary at different times, across multiple users, devices, and keywords. Rather, give us time to run your campaigns long enough to gather data that we can then use to measure and refine your future marketing efforts.