Why your Google rankings change depending on where you are
You search for yourself on Google and you are first. Your customer searches the same thing, two miles away, and does not see you anywhere. Both results are correct.
A Google ranking is not the same for everyone: it depends on where the person searching is. Google documents this itself — the distance between the searcher and the business is one of the three main local ranking factors. Ranking first from your own desk and being invisible to a customer two miles away is therefore not a fault: they are two accurate results, for two different places.
What Google says: relevance, distance, prominence
Google publishes a help page explaining, in a few lines, how its local ranking works. Three things are named, and only one of them concerns us here.
The three, in plain terms
Relevance: how well your business matches what someone is searching for. Google's own advice for improving it is to fill your profile in completely.
Distance: how far you are from the person searching. If they do not share a location, Google estimates one.
Prominence: how well known your business is — how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has both feed into this.
It is the second line that explains everything else. Since distance counts, and distance is different for every person, the ranking is different for every person. There is no single ranking for your business: there is one per place.
What distance means in practice
Picture three pharmacies in one town, half a mile apart. Someone typing "pharmacy" from the north of town will probably see the northern one first. The same search from the south brings up the southern one. None of the three did anything: the searcher's position changed.
This holds within a single neighbourhood too. In dense trades — food, hairdressing, garages — a few hundred yards is sometimes enough to reorder the top three. In rarer trades — a notary, a specialist vet — the visibility area stretches over miles, simply because there are fewer competitors nearby.
Remember the rule: the more businesses in your trade around you, the smaller your visibility area. It is mechanical, and it has nothing to do with the quality of your profile.
What else plays a part: history, account, device
Distance is not the only thing personalising a result. Three others come into play, and they explain why two people standing in the same place sometimes see different things.
| What changes | Effect on what you see |
|---|---|
| Being signed in to your Google account | Google knows your past searches and the places you have looked at |
| Having viewed a profile before | A business you have already looked at can move up in your own results |
| Phone or computer | Location is far more precise on a phone, and the results page is shorter |
| Which app you use | Google Search and the Maps app do not return exactly the same ranking |
None of these is something you can set on your side. They are not a problem to solve: they are the reason a check done "by hand" proves nothing.
Why searching for yourself is the worst possible test
It is everyone's first instinct, and it always gives a flattering answer. When you type your trade on your office computer, signed in: you are at your own address — zero distance from your own business; you are signed in, so Google knows this profile is yours; and you have looked at your own profile dozens of times.
All three stack up. The ranking you see is yours, and it is nobody else's. That is exactly why an owner believes they rank first while their sales rep keeps hearing "we couldn't find you on Google".
Private browsing only fixes part of it: it removes history and the account, not your geographic position. You are still being measured from wherever you are.
How to check objectively, from several places
You have to measure from where your customers actually are, not from where you are. Three ways of doing it, from the most makeshift to the most reliable.
Three methods, least to most reliable
- Ask someone there. A customer, a supplier, a friend who lives in the target neighbourhood: you get a true result, for free. It is one-off and not reproducible, but it is an honest start.
- Go there yourself. Physically visit the neighbourhood, in private browsing, on a phone. Reliable for one point, impractical for ten, and impossible to repeat every month under identical conditions.
- Use a geolocated tracking tool. It queries Google from precise coordinates, with no account and no history, and repeats the same measurement every month. It is the only one of the three that produces a trend line you can compare over time.
Whichever method you use, always record the place and the date next to the result. A ranking without those two is not interpretable, and cannot be compared to anything.
Find out what your customers actually see
Pinperf queries Google from the places you designate — a neighbourhood, a neighbouring town, a retail park — and returns your profile's real ranking, month after month. Without your history, without your account, without your address.
You choose your locations and keywords in about ten minutes.
Going further
If you want to understand how a serious measurement setup is built, the complete guide to local rank tracking covers the principles, the methods, and what makes a setup last.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help — Improve your local ranking on Google