What's with measuring search rank?

[94501]

Okay, here 6 different ways to measure search rank on Google U.S. and I get 6 different answers:

Looking for search term "Lunch Bags" for the site Zappos (just a random example - no connection to me).

SEOMOZ RankTracker - #49

SEOCentro  - #36

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html

ZendProxy.com -  #21

(an anonymizer proxy)

anonymouse.org - no rank

(another anonymizer)

Mikes Marketing Tools - no rank

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/

RankingCheck.com  - #38

Can you duplicate a similar variation?

What gives?

Which if any of these would you rely on?

Thanks... Darcy

[eatyourveggies]

Hi Darcy,

I'm going through a process at the moment of a very thorough analysis of every tool I can get my hands on - more from a technical perspective because I was getting sick of the varying results from different tools / utilities.

I wrote my own scraper utility to get live results from Google as well. I tested 800 keywords using broad, phrase, exact, etc and the results from Google compared to every tool out there is different.

I'm currently writing a document on all of this. Maybe I should post it somewhere, I don't know, but my strong feelings at this point is:

• check with each provider (of the online tool or downloadable software) whether they use broad match, phrase match, or exact match. SEM Rush displays results for "phrase match" but shows [exact match] search volume for that phrase. You almost need a database to remember what criteria each tool uses to return results.

• do they allow you to filter results by domain (google.com, google.com.au, etc)?

• in addition to the above, do they allow you to filter results by only showing results for that country (eg, if you can select "Australia", do they search on google.com.au AND give you the choice to see results for only .com.au domains, or all results that google.com.au would offer up?)

• How recent is their data? Everything costs money - whether it's in API units from Google, API units from a competing tool, or even time and money spent on writing their own scraping software. Free tools aren't going to update their databases every day. SEOMoz (who I've found to be quite accurate) updates their Keyword Analysis Tool database monthly. A lot can happen in 4 weeks. Getting this information can be tough. You need to email each vendor and get their answer - and then trust their answer.

• Tough one... but how savvy is the developer of the tool? I've written my own tools and it's damn hard to get accurate data even from Google directly! There's so many variables. Poorly written software returns poor results. In writing my own stuff, different proxies would return different Google results, even different user agents (web browsers) would return different results. You need a thorough understanding of the technicalities behind obtaining data from or about Google.

There's a few considerations off the top of my head. As I say I'm still putting together my findings. I'm using this reply as an opportunity to hopefully spark a little discussion on this as I think many people have the same problem.

The immediate solution? Write your own software, or use a few tools and average the results. I'm quite the analyst so varying results do my head in. However at the same time, is your goal to get 100% accurate results, or get a good "feel" for the competitive landscape and move on? Sometimes I like to get things perfect, other times my client doesn't have the time to wait, and I'm not paid enough to be that anal!