Indeed, the concept of position is actually more complex than it seems :)
Let's take an example: a site where one of the pages is positioned 16th on a keyword according to SmartKeyword, but 3rd when you search on Google directly.
We check a very useful tool: SEO ninja (which queries several Google data centers in France - https://seo-hero.ninja/). It shows the page ranking between position 5 and no position at all :
And on Google Search Console: Google ranks the page 6th on 2 impressions in Portugal.
And finally, when I test on my computer, I see it 5th and not 3rd!
Why all these differences?
Ranking fluctuates enormously depending on tons of parameters (location, mobile / desktop, browser history, time of day, google tests to see if another page might be more appropriate, etc.)
The lower the volume, the more positions fluctuate because on the very long tail, Google (more specifically the sub-part of its algorithm called "rankbrain") has not yet found its "ideal page" and therefore tests by inverting positions constantly.
Even on the short tail, this can happen if more or less important changes have taken place recently, on our page or those of our competitors. Or if we are on distant positions (20 and more) with therefore more volatility.
==> In this case, given the number of parameters involved, what benchmark to adopt?
Simple, the idea is that we set a reference: we decide to set the parameters to a certain value for everyone (crawl with an empty history, country=en, about the same period of crawl (the weekend) ... and we use these parameters constantly throughout to monitor the evolution of the keyword positions.
This is what SmartKeyword does every weekend.
Will it match what you see in your browser? No, but it doesn't matter since you won't see exactly what your customers see either ;) The main thing is to be constant and consistent in your measurements ;)
Now you know everything!
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