Using Local Pack Grid Rankings for Competitive Local SEO Analysis

Local grid rankings reports have been a great local SEO tool for a while. They can give you a sense of how a business ranks across various areas of a city, county, etc. Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s grid rank report:

We found these reports so useful, we built our own uglier version in Looker Studio so we could customize the data. One of the first things we did was set up competitor grid rankings. The idea was to see how competitors ranked in Local Packs throughout a business’ service area so we could find new opportunities.

Here’s our homely version of a grid rank for a veterinarian in Oakland, CA:

This tracks the business’ Local Pack position across 55 keywords. At a glance, we can see a few things:
– One of their practitioner’s GBP is ranking for some keywords (line 2). This may be an issue we’ll want to address.
– The client business is only ranking for 36/55 keywords, so there’s some opportunity here.
– Of the keywords the business is ranking for, they only rank within a 5-mile radius of their location (slide bar at the top right).

Using the keyword filter, we can display keywords the client is not ranking for. We used “dog oncologist” and saw this:

We can see all the competitors that rank in Local Packs across the entire service area (28 miles in either direction). Let’s hone in on OakVet Animal Specialty Hospital since it’s located in Oakland near our client:

We can see it ranks in 22 Local Packs for “dog oncologist” across a 28-mile radius. They rank ~#1 in Local Packs close to their location (on the west side of Oakland). We can also see they don’t rank as well (#2) as you move eastward from their location towards our client’s location. The client is about 3 miles NorthEast of OakVet. So I am thinking if we tried, we could start to compete with OakVet for “dog oncologist” queries.

From there it’s pretty simple to see that OakVet has an Oncology service page at https://www.oakvetash.com/oncology/ and our client does not have one. In fact, they barely mention oncology on their site. I imagine if we stood up a “Pet Oncology in Oakland” page on their site, we’d pretty quickly start to show up in the Local Packs.

Anyhow, once you get your hands on this data, there is a lot of potential to use it to analyze how a business performs at a truly local level and where the areas of opportunity are.

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