Gathering accurate SEO data is essential to yield accurate, actionable insights. Here’s how to overcome some common hurdles that skew SEO data. 

In the early days of SEO, gathering performance data about a site to guide optimization was easy. Today, however, that’s no longer true. SEO specialists now increasingly find themselves working from distorted site data—often unknowingly. It happens for a variety of reasons, many of which stem from technological hurdles. For example, SERP personalization can skew page search performance metrics. So can problems like network congestion, throttling, and location bias. The good news is that there are ways to overcome the technical barriers to gathering clean SEO data. Here’s everything you need to know.

Hidden problems that create distorted SEO insights

Gathering accurate SEO data is the cornerstone of the science of website optimization. However, many SEO pros don’t adequately account for the many factors that may distort their data. Everything from the browser you’re using to your ISP, local network, and even how your SEO tools connect to the internet can quietly shape the data collected. Here are the key factors involved:

Search engine personalization measures

One of the biggest factors that can affect your SEO data is search engine personalization. Major search engines like Google go to great lengths to deliver SERPs tailored to the searcher’s preferences. As a result, they consider factors like logged-in accounts, local search history, and device characteristics when delivering query results. So, the SERPs SEO specialists use to base their insights on may be more reflective of their own search profile than of their target audience.

Your location

Your perceived location also shapes everything you see on a SERP. Even a location difference of a mile or two can alter rankings, map pack visibility, and which snippets appear on a given results page. Those differences can make targeted page performance improvements all but impossible unless you account for them.

Networking and ISP issues

The performance of your local network and every network between you and a target can impact your SEO data collection. For example, slow connections or congestion can lead to inaccurate load time statistics, broken API calls, and even issues with web crawls. If you’re working on an extensive SEO project, the high traffic volume created by your research tools may even lead to your ISP throttling your traffic, poisoning your results.

The introduction of bias via personalization and search history

Understanding how search engines like Google apply personalization can help you avoid the distortion in your SEO data it creates. Fortunately, unlike other parts of the Google algorithm, there are no secrets involved. As per its own websearch documentation, personalization takes the following factors into account:

• Your search history
• Your account activity
• Location
• Language
• Device type
• Clicked results

Avoiding personalized results

Importantly, it’s possible to avoid many of Google’s personalization efforts in one of two ways. You can turn off Search Personalization and Web & App Activity (WAA) in your user account settings. Or, you can log out of your account entirely. However, that will only get you so far. For the cleanest data possible, you should also clear your browser cookies or use incognito mode. You can also append the “&pws=0” suffix to your Google search URL to force depersonalized results.

How location bias can affect SERPs

Location influences modern search engine results more than perhaps any other factor. It’s all a part of search engines’ drive to prioritize local intent. For SEO experts, particularly those with geographically dispersed clients, this can create massive headaches. That’s especially true when optimizing for specific local intent queries. You can see an excellent example of this by searching for any phrase with the suffix “near me”. Doing so will yield a different SERP result in one town versus another that’s mere minutes away. That can make it near-impossible to obtain valid performance data. It can also make validating the data you do collect extremely difficult.

Eliminating or reducing location bias

Ideally, the best way for SEO specialists to eliminate location bias in the data they collect is to work from the same geographic location as their client or target audience. In some situations, however, that’s impossible or impractical. As an alternative, it’s a good idea to rely on a few commercial VPN services with as wide a variety of endpoint locations as possible. That allows you to simulate your location to within a reasonable distance of the client’s market. However, it’s worth noting that it’s essential to use the fastest VPN service you can find, lest you skew other collected data due to slow connection speeds and suboptimal routes.

For high-value clients, it may even be worth deploying a preconfigured VPN endpoint to the client’s network. That can be an ideal way to ensure data collection that’s free of location bias and that accurately represents the target audience. Small, inexpensive SOHO VPN routers make doing this a snap.

The effect of connection speeds and throttling on SEO tools

The local network you’re using to connect to the internet and your internet connection itself can have a huge impact on the SEO data you collect. For example, if you’re using something like Google Lighthouse, the data it produces is only as valid as network conditions permit. So, if your office has an outdated router? That will result in skewed data. Or, if your ISP’s in the middle of a hardware refresh? That may skew results, too.

Reducing the effects of connection issues

Unfortunately, you can’t always control every aspect of the network you use during data collection. You have even less control over what’s going on in your ISP’s network. There are, however, some simple ways to reduce the effects of poor connectivity on the data you collect. One is always to use a wired connection instead of Wi-Fi. The former isn’t vulnerable to crosstalk and spectrum congestion. That’s the cause of more connectivity issues than any other single factor. You can also run your testing tools from a cloud desktop within the Google, AWS, or Azure clouds. They have reliable interconnections to internet backbones, which eliminates most connectivity concerns.

Building a high-performance SEO testing environment

For reliable, repeatable, clean data collection, it’s a good idea to create a standardized testing environment that checks all the boxes mentioned above. Ideally, it should consist of:

• A documented data collection workflow
• Standardized and enforced browser settings
• Multi-tool data validation
• Consistent locations for SERP checks when precisely-located endpoints aren’t available
• Available cloud resources for offsite performance metric gathering

Cleaner data leads to better results

There’s an old acronym—GIGO—that any computer programmer should instantly recognize. It stands for garbage in, garbage out. It points out that the results of a computer program can only ever be as good as the data fed into the program. That’s also true in SEO optimization. By taking active steps to create an environment that facilitates clean SEO data collection, it’s possible to ensure high-quality results. So, if you’re an SEO specialist who hasn’t already done so, take some time to audit your data collection workflows. If they aren’t taking the factors detailed above into account, you’d do well to make targeted changes as soon as possible.