How often do you check your website’s rankings, or more importantly, how often should you check your rankings?
Google updates its index frequently throughout the day, so depending on what time you look at your rankings, and depending on where you look from, your rankings could be different at different times of the day. Where you look from is important, because Google uses many data centres to provide its results, so if you perform a search from one computer, at the same time that a colleague on a different IP address performs a search from another, the rankings could very well be different.
Does this mean you should check your rankings several times a day, and from multiple computers? No, definitely not.
Checking your SEO rankings is like cooking. You know it takes time, you know you have to be patient, yet sometimes you just can’t help yourself by sneaking a peek in the oven to check the progress.
Just as those TV adverts for pensions and investments warn you, your rankings can go up as well as down, so checking regularly will just drive you crazy. At StuckOn, we monitor rankings every week and we publish reports every month. This allows enough time for SEO, content and other factors to take effect.
There’s nothing wrong with checking your rankings every day, you just need to be aware that with the rate of fluctuation from Google (and especially Yahoo) that you may see quite a difference looking at your rankings so often.
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