How to track local rankings, step by step.

Before you start: what you are measuring

You are not measuring "a ranking". You are estimating a rank surface: the business's local pack position as a function of the searcher's location. Every choice in this chapter serves that goal. If you only remember one thing: fix your measurement design before the first scan, because comparisons across time are only valid inside a frozen design.

Step 1: Choose the keyword set

List the queries customers actually use: service terms ("water heater repair"), category terms ("plumber"), and "near me" variants. Five to fifteen keywords per location is a practical starting set. Write them down — this list stays fixed for the life of the campaign, because changing keywords mid-campaign breaks comparability.

Step 2: Configure the geo-grid

Lay a geo-grid over the service area. Practical defaults: a 7×7 grid spanning the area where most customers live; tighter (5×5, smaller span) for dense urban businesses, wider (9×9+) for service-area businesses covering suburbs. Centre the grid on the business. In LocalRank, grid size and span are set per scan; the current options are documented at localrank.so.

Step 3: Run and inspect the scan

Run the scan and read the coverage map: green points are top-three positions, warming colours are lower. On a first scan, look for the falloff edge — the boundary where the listing drops out of the pack — and note its shape per keyword. That edge is where all future work will show up.

Step 4: Archive and annotate

Store the scan with its date and any context (work shipped, reviews added, categories changed). The archive is what turns scans into evidence; annotations are what turn evidence into attribution. This is the step manual checking can never replicate.

Step 5: Set the cadence

Schedule re-scans weekly or monthly and hold the cadence constant. Weekly suits active campaigns; monthly suits maintenance. LocalRank automates scheduling and reporting with plans from $29 per month. Who consumes the output differs by audience: see the agency and multi-location chapters, and compare tool options on the comparison page.

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