Why do Rankings Have a Big Difference Between Me and My Client

[AskFred]

I am a freelance SEO guy (based in India) and work for many clients across the globe. One of my clients (based in Spain) pays me depending upon the position of the keyword on Google. We both use Rank Checker (firefox addon) and have been noticing big differences in the rankings of the keywords.

Can someone out here give the reason for this (although I understand that googles different data centers do play a role). I would also appreciate if someone could recommend some other tool/software to check and find both of our rankings to be similar.

Thanks in advance!

[tedster]

Hello AskFred, and welcome to the forums.

The biggest factor here is most likely different results for searchers in different locations - it's called geo-targeting or geo-location.

Google also changes results in other ways, such as by browser, by recent search history, whether the user is logged into a Google acount at the time, load balancing (some data center servers may not be in synch) - but in this case, it's geolocation. You can sometimes even see different results on some searches from two different parts of a major city, and certainly between two cities such as New York and Boston.

[AskFred]

Thanks for the reply!

Can we use any tool/software that would give us same results or is this something which is never going to be possible.

[tedster]

You can use a VPN, so in essence you're both searching from the same location - lots of work just for rank checking. We've got a thread with some other ways being discussed that might also get you close: [webmasterworld.com...]

pays me depending upon the position of the keyword on Google.

I think you'll find that is no longer a viable business model. If you want a pay-for-performance arrangement, then these days it's better to be paid for improvements in search traffic, rather than rankings,

[pavlovapete]

it's better to be paid for improvements in search traffic

or even conversions (sales, signups, phone calls, etc)

I agree with tedster - given the Google's twitches that sort of payment model can be quite risky.

And the other thing to point out - which you may not want to tell your client - is that the website visitors are going to be seeing something entirely different as well. Another reason why getting paid based on what your boss sees is a suspect metric.

IIRC you may be able to use the log files to determine the page number from which the visitors come.

[edited by: tedster at 9:26 am (utc) on Aug. 11, 2009]
[edit reason] by request [/edit]