Rank Tracking for Local Keywords

Hey,

I recently created my first local site, it targets dentists in my city. The main kw "dentist city" gets around 1600 local exact searches / month. I threw up a nice theme, with a lead gen form, some content and great onpage SEO and subsequently followed up with some backlinks.

Now, I normally track my rankings with Rank Tracker, which is pretty accurate 99% of the time. The software states, that my sites currently is ranked #5 for it's main kw, same goes for SEScout, Traffic Travis, or any other Rank Checker. However, if I try to find my site manually I just can't seem to find it, it's not even ranked within the Top30 (I tried manually from my PC, via anonymouse, via my mobile phone connection etc.).

How can that be and how should/could I track my local keywords/sites efficiently?

First, make sure you are checking the rank in correct location search engine. As you are aware, rank varies based on the location.

Yes, I'm well aware. The site is targeted for the german market, subsquently I choose google.de as the respective search engine for the keywords. Still, each and every rank tracker software states, that the KW is ranked at #5 or #6 (small deviations).

It's only for this local term tho, all my other sites (normal micro niche sites) show pretty accurate rankings, that can & have been verified with manual search.

there are quite a few reasons for results discrepancies between manual and automated rank tracker search:

- browser cookies - remove them
- browsing history - remove browsing history
- geo location - you can override Google's geo targeting by putting this &gl=US (or whatever country you are interested in) search operator at the end of Google search result URL, or use free seo tools like Ready2Search

If the above things weren't done, you would surely get a discrepancy in manual and automated search results. this applies to any rank tracker be it ours from seo powersuite or others