Pixelrage.net

Today, we did an interesting test at the office. I noticed that our corporate site is now ranking for an intensely competitive one-word keyword in Google organic search. The keyword is historically known as a high converter for us. Picture a plumbing supply company ranking #1 for “faucets,” that’s pretty comparable to this situation. After sending around an FYI email about the occurrence, I started getting responses about how this SERP result wasn’t the case in other areas of the country.

So far, I’ve heard back from someone in North Carolina (we’re ranking #10 in organic there), California (we’re #1 there) and an employee visiting our NYC-metro office from California (she’s seeing us as #6). To satisfy my curiosity, I typed in this one-word keyword in my Droid’s Google browser, and we’re coming up #2 there.

It’s no surprise that search engines display different results based on regional searches – if you’re searching for “roofing” in TX as opposed to NY, you’ll be seeing a different Google 7-pack map result and slightly different SERPs based on what’s more popular in that area…but for super generic terms, it also appears to fluctuate.

Try it out yourself: if you have family and friends scattered across the country, test out your favorite website’s biggest SERP accomplishment by asking them how far up you appear in organic search for that word (be sure to explain what the hell a SERP and “organic search” is if they’re not marketers, of course).

I was once tormented when one of my .us sites wasn’t ranking for its “Holy Grail” of keywords…yet, Google Analytics was showing hits from that keyword. However, I wasn’t even appearing on page fifty-bajilion of Google for it. It could only mean that I did have a #1 ranking for it elsewhere in the country.

The moral of this story is not to celebrate a SERP position without the knowledge of it not being the case elsewhere in the country – let alone the world…or, perhaps, the device that the search was performed on. The internet is shifting toward geo-targeting and localization; not only in pay-per-click, but in organic results, too.

Think about that before you post on a forum and brag about your new SERP ranking! You’ll probably have a whole bunch of people from other locations proving you wrong.

You may also want to think about it before bragging your accomplishments to a client who hired you for SEO. Or, if you are that customer yourself :)