Grid rank tracking: seeing where you rank street by street

Ask most businesses where they rank and you get one number. Ask where that number was measured and you usually get a pause, because it was measured on somebody's laptop, at the office, once.

In local search that is not a measurement. Distance from the searcher is one of the three factors Google names, so the answer genuinely changes as you move. One number describes one point on a map, and it is almost always the point where you look best.

What a grid is

You pick a search term and an area. The tool checks the results from a grid of points across that area, usually somewhere between 25 and 169 of them, and colours each point by where you appeared.

What you get back is not a number, it is a shape. And the shape is more useful than the number, because it tells you something a ranking position cannot: how far your visibility extends, and in which directions it does not.

Reading the shapes

After running a lot of these, four patterns come up repeatedly. This is our reading of them rather than a published rule, but the diagnoses have held up.

A tight bright circle around your pin

You rank well where you are and drop off sharply within a kilometre or two. This is the normal starting position for a business that has its listing in order and little else.

The diagnosis is prominence. You are winning where distance is doing the work for you and losing everywhere it is not. The fix is reviews, mentions, and a website that backs up the claim, none of which are quick and all of which widen the circle.

A wide even spread

Good positions across the whole grid, fading gently at the edges. This is what a strong local business looks like, and if you see it, the thing to do is extend the grid outward until you find where it stops. That edge is your real service boundary.

A lopsided blob

Strong in one direction, weak in another, with no obvious reason. Almost always a competitor. There is a business sitting between you and the weak side, and they are closer to those points than you are.

Worth identifying who it is and looking at what they have that you do not, because in that direction you are not competing against Google, you are competing against them specifically.

Bright at the edges, dim in the middle

The unsettling one. It usually means the centre is contested by several stronger businesses clustered there, and you are picking up the fringe where they thin out. It is a real position and it is worth knowing about, because it says the centre is not where your next customer is.

How to use it, rather than just look at it

1. 01Run one grid before you change anything, on the search that matters most. That is your baseline and you only get one chance to record it.
2. 02Make one change. A category, a batch of reviews, a set of service pages. One, so the next grid means something.
3. 03Wait six weeks. Grids move slowly and reading them weekly will drive you mad.
4. 04Run it again on the same term, same area, same grid size. Comparability is the entire value.
5. 05Look at the shape, not the average. An average position that improved by 0.4 tells you less than a circle that visibly widened to the north.

What it will not tell you

A grid measures visibility, not money. It is entirely possible to widen the circle and take no more calls, which means the listing or the page is not converting the people now seeing it.

Which is why a grid belongs alongside enquiries counted by source rather than instead of them. The full set of five worth tracking is here, and if your grid is a tight circle, the diagnosis list covers what usually widens it.