Upon searching for certain keywords or phrase, you will notice a set of links on your home computer will differ from those on your Smartphone or tablet. And the same difference will be seen when comparing results between two locations.

This is due to Google's mysterious and ever-changing search algorithms.

What causes Google’s search results to change?

The primary contributing factors are:

-    Device (desktop, mobile, tablet)

After the Google Panda update, mobile responsive websites were ranked higher than those with only desktop pages. So if your website is not mobile responsive then even after a good SEO Utah strategy your website may not rank in your favor on mobile devices.

-    Location by IP address

Search varies by location. If you search for ‘plumber’ the first thing returned will likely be a plumber close to you. This is very beneficial for a local business but may affect a national company looking to achieve broader visibility.

-    Search history (cookies, cached data, bookmarks)

Whether you remember or not, but Google remembers everything you searched for in the past via cookies, cached data, and bookmarks. This is good when you are regularly searching for something you want to purchase or interested in, but it’s misleading if you are searching for your own company name or keyword on a regular basis. Google understands it as a favored keyword and slowly moves it higher up on search results for your device.

-    Google account access

When we are logged into our Google account and perform a search, Google stores such data to personalize our search results; thus our search results vary when we are logged out of our Google account.

-    Ads are shown

It’s no secret that Google places ads on its search engine result pages. These ads greatly change the appearance of the results that you see. Your website ranking for a particular keyword will look different on desktops and Smartphone depending on the number and position of the ads.

-    Keywords

Keywords play a very important role in SEO Utah and search results. For example, if your keyword is a product available online, your search results will be shopping links or e-commerce websites. And changing a word or two in your search can greatly alter the results you receive.