Keyword Rankings Report Accuracy

[Kingof5]

How many of you routinely have inaccurate data in your Moz Pro keyword rankings reports? I just checked 5 of our terms that came in this morning - yes, it's a not logged in, non-personalized, incognito, cleared cache search - and none of them actually ranked where Moz said they ranked.

One was listed in the top 5 and wasn't even on the first page. One was listed at position 3 but was actually at position 8, a big difference when it comes to CTR. And the report will have stuff like our brand name not ranked at all one week, then jumping by 45+ positions the next week, then gone the next week. And it doesn't fluctuate like that.

I get that the reports are general to what most people see, but should such big disparities be expected?

[TomRayner]

Hi David

There's obviously a few things just to check on - such as checking the right localised version of Google is being tracked and also the fact that the rankings update each Friday and not daily.

Having said that, seeing such dramatic fluctuations is a bit much.  It's probably a good idea to flag this to the customer support team and see if there are any issues.

In the mean time, if you're looking for a free keyword tracker that is accurate the majority of the time, you might want to try Rank Checker Ace for a web-based platform, or Rankerizer for a program that you can install on your PC.

Hope this helps.

[Moz.HelpTeam]

Hey David,

Tom brought up some good points and he's spot on with the fact that Google is always difficult to compare anything against.  They have so many more details that we can't replicate even with incognito windows such as Region, IP Address, Time of Day, etc.

I took a look at your account and compared a handful of keywords.  You definitely have some volatile keywords that fluctuate often.  This makes it harder to keep the reports up to date with the daily rankings since we run these reports weekly.  You may want to utilize Rank Tracker to check keywords a bit more manually if you want more control over your comparisons.

If you have more questions about your keywords and reports, the help team is always happy to investigate specific situations to give you more details about the comparisons.  Feel free to email your examples to help@moz.com and let us dig in for you more.