Search "dentist abbotsford" on your phone from a driveway in Auguston. Then do it on the laptop in your office off Sumas Way. Then ask me to run it from the machine in our office that does nothing but check rankings. You'll get three different pages, and the natural question is which one is lying.
None of them. That's the uncomfortable part. Each is a correct answer to a slightly different question, and understanding why is most of understanding what a Google ranking in Abbotsford actually is.
Google doesn't have a results page. It makes one.
There's no master list somewhere that says you're fourth for "dentist abbotsford". Every time someone searches, Google builds a page for that person, in that place, at that moment. Four things do most of the shaping.
Location, first and by a wide margin for local searches. Your phone in Auguston reports a position accurate to a few metres. The laptop in your office reports wherever your internet provider says the connection is, which for a lot of Abbotsford businesses is somewhere vaguely in the Fraser Valley and occasionally Vancouver. The map pack especially is built around that point. A dentist near Highstreet will show up higher for a phone in Highstreet than for one downtown on Essendene, and the difference between the two can be the difference between in the box and not.
Personalization, second. If you're logged into Google (and on your phone you are), it remembers what you've clicked. You've opened your own website a few hundred times. Google has quietly learned that you like that site, and nudges it up for you. This is why owners often see themselves higher than their customers do. It's not vanity. It's a feedback loop that only runs for you.
The device, third. Phone results and desktop results aren't laid out the same way, and for a lot of searches they aren't ordered the same way either. On a phone the map pack takes the whole first screen. On a desktop you can see the pack and the first few organic results at once. Position five on a desktop is visible. Position five on a phone is three thumb swipes down.
Time, fourth. Google tests things constantly. The same search run an hour apart can come back a little different, not because anything about your site changed, but because Google was trying something. Over a week it averages out. On a single search it doesn't.
What a measured rank is
So when I say seoabbotsford.com is first for "seo abbotsford" (which it is, as of the date on this post), I mean something specific. A real Chrome browser, on a computer in our office on McCallum Road, ran that search with personalization switched off by a setting in the search address, with the location pinned to Abbotsford rather than wherever the connection happened to resolve, and recorded the ten organic results and the three map-pack businesses it saw. It does that for each tracked phrase, spaced eight to twelve minutes apart so it behaves like a person rather than a script, somewhere between 80 and 120 searches a day across all clients.
That's a rank. Not the rank. There's no such thing as the rank. But it's a consistent measurement, taken the same way every time from the same place, and that consistency is the whole point. When the line on a 90-day chart moves, it moved because something changed in Google's answer, not because you were standing in a different parking lot.
It also means I can tell you plainly what the measurement doesn't cover. It doesn't know what a person in Mission sees, unless we pin a location in Mission and track that separately. It doesn't know what you see on your own phone, and it never will, because nobody can measure a personalized result except the person it's personalized for. And since Google stopped showing more than ten results per page last year, it can't tell you you're "on page four". It can tell you you're in the top ten or you aren't. I'd rather report that bucket honestly than invent a number past it.
What to do with this
Stop checking on your own phone. It's the least reliable instrument you own for this job, and it will make you feel better than you should. If you want a rough idea of what a stranger sees, open a private window on a desktop, and even then the location is a guess.
Better: track it properly, from a fixed point, on a schedule. That's what the $79 rank tracking plan is for, and it's why RankTrack notes where the search was run from on every check. The number on its own isn't the information. The number, from a known place, over time, is.