Question: About Google's personalization of search results and its impact on monitoring ranking results

[RandallScrubs]

Given Google's personalization of search results for anyone who's logged into a Google property, how realistic and how actually meaningful/worthwhile is it to monitor one's ranking results for any keyword term these days?

[GlobeRunner]

Generally speaking, with the personalization, it's difficult to monitor rankings. There are tools that will monitor your rankings, and generally they don't log into Google when checking rankings. They do try to set their location, though, so you can make it look like you're in Dallas and searching.

What we recommend is looking at overall organic traffic and conversions--rather than obsessing over keyword rankings. You can, though, look at Search Analytics in Google Search Console to see if there are particular keywords that you are monitoring, and see the impressions, clicks, and average position. One way to look at that data is pull the data by page and look at certain pages on your site and look at its keywords to see if there are any changes you can make to each individual page.

[RandallScrubs]

Thanks Eric - While we are well-aware of various ranking monitor tools (we currently use MozPro), that's the essence of our question here. And it leads to the bigger question: What is main value of SEO these days given how it's realistically possible that most of your target audience is now getting personalized SERP results anyway. So then why put in all the effort to rank for particular terms when you could be easily displaced by sites your audience has viewed more regularly than your own and hence Google gives them the better position over yours regardless of having better SEO implemented on your site?