Searching for Yourself and Learning Nothing

Why your own search misleads

Four things make your results different from everybody else's, and they all push in the same direction.

History. You have visited your own site repeatedly, which makes it more likely to appear for you.

Location. You are in your service area, frequently at your own address, which is where you rank best.

Account. Being signed in adds personalisation from everything you have done before.

Device and network. Results differ between a phone on mobile data and a desktop in the office.

Together those make your own site look considerably more visible than it is, which is a comfortable and expensive illusion.

What a private window does and does not fix

Opening a private or incognito window removes the account personalisation and some of the history.

It does not remove location, which is inferred from your connection regardless of whether you are signed in.

Which means a private window is better than a normal one and still shows you results from your own town, on your own network.

For a local business, location is the largest single factor, so this only partly helps.

It is still worth using, because it is instant and it removes the most flattering distortion.

Where the real answer is

Search Console reports what actually happened: which searches showed your pages, how often, how many people clicked, and the average position.

That is measured across real searchers rather than simulated from your desk, and it is free.

The performance report will show queries you never thought to check, which is frequently the most useful part.

Businesses regularly discover they rank well for a search they had not considered and poorly for the one they had been checking daily.

Ten minutes in that report is worth more than any amount of typing your own service into a search box.

A worked example

A business owner convinced his site ranked first for his main service, having checked repeatedly.

Search Console showed an average position in the teens for that term, with almost no clicks.

It also showed the site appearing frequently for a related phrase he had never targeted, in a good position, producing most of his search traffic.

He had been optimising for the wrong term for a year, on the evidence of results that were personalised to him.

The change was straightforward: writing properly about the phrase that was already working, rather than continuing to chase one where he was invisible.

His comment was that the false confidence had cost more than ignorance would have.

Average position, and how to read it

A number that gets misread, so worth explaining.

It is an average across every impression, which means a page ranking third in one town and thirtieth in another shows as something in between.

Which is why a position of eleven does not mean you are eleventh anywhere in particular.

Movement in the number matters more than the number itself, and comparing periods is more informative than reading a single figure.

Clicks and impressions are more concrete, and for a small business they are the numbers worth watching.

What competitors actually see

The same distortion applies in reverse, and it is worth knowing.

A competitor checking their own position sees themselves higher than they are, for exactly the same reasons.

Which means comparisons drawn from anybody's manual searching are unreliable in both directions.

If a competitor tells you they rank first for something, they may be describing their own screen.

And if your position looks worse than theirs when you check, that comparison is being made on your device, which flatters you, so the real gap may be different again.

The only reliable comparison is between your own periods, in your own data, which is why the report matters and the anecdotes do not.

The counter-case

Where checking manually is reasonable.

Confirming a page appears at all, immediately after publishing or fixing something, where you want a yes or no rather than a position.

Checking what the result actually looks like: the title, the description, whether the listing appears alongside it. Search Console does not show you that.

And looking at who else appears, which is competitor research rather than measurement.

All of those are perfectly legitimate uses of a manual search, and not one of them is measuring your position.

Checking from elsewhere

Sometimes you genuinely need to know what somebody in another town sees.

The honest options are limited. A private window on a different network, asking somebody who lives there, or using a tool that simulates a location.

Adding a location to the query is not the same thing, since searching for a service plus a town from your own address still returns location-influenced results.

For most small businesses this level of precision is unnecessary. Search Console reports what people in your area actually experienced, which is the question that matters.

The exception is a business expanding into a new area, where knowing your position there before committing time and money is genuinely worth establishing properly.

Why daily checking causes bad decisions

Beyond being inaccurate, the habit itself produces poor judgement.

Positions move for reasons that have nothing to do with you: somebody else published something, a result layout changed, or the search was interpreted slightly differently that day.

Somebody checking daily sees that movement as feedback on their own actions, and responds to noise.

Which leads to changes made in reaction to a fluctuation, then reversed the following week, then made again, with the site never settling long enough to be measured.

The businesses that improve are the ones that make a considered change, note the date, and leave it alone for three months.

That requires the discipline not to look, which is harder than any of the technical work.

What to do instead of checking daily

1. Set up Search Console if you have not.
2. Look at the performance report monthly, not daily.
3. Compare against the previous period.
4. Read the query list for terms you did not expect.
5. Watch clicks and impressions rather than position.
6. Note the date of any change and look again at three months.

The fourth is the one that produces the most useful surprises, and it is the reason this is worth doing at all rather than simply not checking.

Setting the tool up is covered in what Google has to do before it can rank you.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.