Local SEO Success: How to track rankings, conversions, calls

Tips for setting up and analyzing local SEO ranking reports to discover opportunities and measure success.

Measuring and reporting on the success of local SEO efforts is crucial for improving your strategy. The main goal is (most times) increased customers and revenue, this is done by tracking incremental progress through rankings, traffic, and conversions.

Today we go over how to do this, what tools to use and strategies to get your local business more customers, keep existing ones, and increase revenue from both.

Setting up local ranking data gathering and reports

The first thing is to set up local rank tracking using a tool that has geo-grid map capabilities.

Local Falcon and Places Scout are two of the favorites for the industry. These tools accurately measure local business rankings across any service area. Local Falcon focuses on Google Maps, while Places Scout covers both Google Maps and organic search.

When setting up the tool use various keywords. Don’t just focus on one version of your top keyword(s). Add the long tail versions to get a better representation. Regularly check Search Results page screenshots for your keywords to monitor when map packs appear and when Google stops displaying them.

Track keywords that already drive traffic to your website if you know them. While ranking high for a relevant main term is important, if it doesn’t generate traffic for related searches, you may want to track another one. Use Google Search Console to verify that the keywords you target in Maps receive organic search traffic.

Google now includes business opening hours as a ranking factor. Make sure to run ranking scans for your business when Google Business Profile indicates that your business is open.

Setting up a radius for grid rank tracking

The tools mentioned above can use a radius in miles for tracking. Adjust the rank tracking grid size to match your business. For instance, if you’re a real estate agent operating within a 100-mile radius, don’t set the grid for the entire distance, as your listing may not rank that far. If you are a restaurant, set it for a nearby neighborhoods, 5-20 miles.

During your first scan, if you see too many red pins in the tool, it’s a sign you will likely need to scale the radius back as you are too zoomed out. If you see too much green, you will likely want to zoom out to gauge where rankings drop off.

This is how you spot where you have the opportunity to improve rankings.

Analyzing local search ranking grids to find opportunities

Now that you’ve established rank tracking grids in the tool, how do you use them for guide your local SEO strategy?

Start with competitor research by checking businesses outranking yours for important keywords. Compare your listing to theirs, considering factors known to impact rankings, such as review count and rating, keywords in the business name, primary category they use, secondary categories they use, attributes they have.

If your listing can improve in any of the above, prioritize those enhancements, treating them as low-hanging fruit. Then, evaluate the quality of their website/GBP landing page, asking questions like:  are they linking to their homepage or an internal page, what is the primary keyword and focus of their GBP landing page, is it quality content, etc.

Do some keyword analysis  with the tool to see your potential to improve local rankings for your target keywords. If a couple of competitors excel with high scores in the tool, you can likely enhance your score with some SEO effort.

On the other hand, if no competitor achieves a high score, it’s practical to move on from optimizing for that keyword. The data indicates that influencing rankings for that specific keyword is not as straightforward.

Success off the Maps: Local organic search

Focus on organic search to increase visibility for competitive implicit searches with higher search volume. Don’t just work on your homepage, even if that is the page you are optimizing for your most important keyword. Spend time optimizing your service pages, location pages, and blog posts to help build authority for your local services. 

Make sure each page has a clear keyword and location focus, and that you are tracking organic rankings with a grid tracking tool like you would for Map rankings. This helps you gauge the reach of all your site pages, informing whether you should adjust your content strategy to include more location-specific content for your desired service area.

Service area pages significantly boost organic visibility in a large service area. Well-crafted service area pages can even outperform a GBP landing page in terms of combined traffic and conversions. Pay attention here real estate agents, auto detailers and others that go to the customer.

If you’re struggling to generate enough leads with just the GBP, consider investing in service area pages to appear in cities/towns where you’re currently unseen.

Measure and report on conversions

At this point you've setup grid tracking tools to enhance local SEO strategies efficiently. Prioritizing maps and organic for optimal search visibility, you’re also monitoring SEO success through ranking improvements and traffic increases.

However, don’t forget to track conversions resulting from these efforts. Because this is the ultimate and real goal, customers, buying customers.

This is where having a solid source of conversion data becomes crucial, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a great platform to better track every event on your website.

Once you have the data, spend the time to go through the site and make sure all sources of leads are tracking, such as calls, texts, chatbots, contact forms, emails, online scheduler/booking tools.

Think about every possible way a user can contact the business via the website. That should be set up as an event in GA4. 

Importance of call tracking

Tracking calls is valuable for most businesses, set up call tracking. Yes, it will add an extra cost, and some may argue that since GA4 will track all users who click on a phone call button or link automatically, what’s the point? 

Click-to-call data tells you nothing about the quality of the calls, and they are also over-inflated, as there is no way to not track accidental clicks via that event.  The recommended way is to set up a call tracking tool on your website and see for yourself the discrepancy in reporting these two events.

Using call tracking software to track calls from your GBP and website is a game changer for reporting. Use a service that can dynamically change the phone number on a page based on the source of that user. We use CallRail.

Plus, using a call tracking tool on your GBP will allow you to see data for all the calls that come in from the GBP, not just mobile click-to-calls, which is all that GBP insights tracks. 

Start reporting and reap the benefits

Start collecting data for more reliable month-over-month and year-over-year reporting. Monthly fluctuations can be misleading, especially for seasonal businesses. 

Don’t delay setting up data tracking for your website and GBP. While month-over-month increases are positive, don’t be discouraged by occasional declines; focus on your goal and let data, not opinions, guide your tactics.

Takeaways

I know that was a handful, this is why we exist, to help you handle all that technical stuff and do the work for you, you just get the data interpretation in a report and the recommended actions to get you more customers, keep existing ones and increase revenue from both.

But if you feel so inclined, you can set this up yourself:

1. Setup a tool to collect local ranking info
2. Determine your optimal radius
3. Do competitor research to find opportunities
4. Hyper-focus on local search rankings for maps
5. Measure and review reports monthly, identify trends over time, especially conversions
6. Setup a Call tracking tool if getting phones call is important for your local business
7. Start now

That last step could be the most important, just start. Do it yourself or find a partner that can get all this done for you.

You'll like the increase in traffic and buying customers.