We were doing some SEO and SEM the other day and just happened to be working with one of our clients that are located in a different state and we realized that their keyword phrases were ranking with different natural position results in Google. We will refer to this as Localized Ranking in Google or Regional Ranking in Google.

My client was looking at his results for a specific keyword phrase and saying, no look again, it is on page 1 and I was saying, NO I see it on page 2. In the middle of all this I decided to call another developer that was in a different state and had him test the results. Guess what, it was different for him too!

Has Google grown so big that they have different servers in every major city? Well, we attended a webinar a while back and seems not only do they have a lot of servers popping up all over the world, but also have humans interacting a bit with some of the ranking and results. That is fine, but when we are doing SEM (search engine marketing) and trying to accurately measure our results it becomes a little more difficult these days!

After we realized this was happening we purposely started to optimize for one keyword phrase in particular and we wanted to measure how long it would take to make its way across Google’s various servers and to also measure how much the ranking would increase. Upon doing this we came across yet another factor in Google. Not only do they present the natural results for a keyword phrase differently from a localized or regional area, but we also realized the keyword rankings would vary from browser to browser.

For this specific reason, when we perform SEO or SEM on a website, we are now deploying a team of developers from many different regions and locations to measure the total effectiveness of the keyword marketing campaign.

After a few days we noticed the optimization for one of the keyword phrase was taking effect but on a different scale for each of us. For the client, they moved up from Google’s page 1 position 10 to position 5 yet for me it I saw this particular phrase on page 8 and it moved up all the way to page 5! That is a strange result to say the least. So, with this in mind, does it seem like Google might have to Propagate SERP (search engine rank position) across all there servers?!!

CASE STUDY – NOTE: This was not the case for all keyword phrases, but it did occur more often than not. I would like to open this topic up for discussion and welcome all thoughts and findings with Google’s Localized Search Engine results and rankings of keyword phrases.