How to Track Your Local Rankings in Google

Monitor where your business stands in search results.

Want to know where your business stands for the best keywords in Google?

After all, if you’re a veterinarian in Vancouver, and you’re working on your local marketing… don’t you need to know where you show up for keywords like “Vancouver veterinarian” - and how those standings are changing over time as you work on your website? 

Otherwise, how do you know if your efforts are actually working?

That’s where rank tracking comes in! A rank tracking tool will monitor the position of your website and your Google My Business listing for keywords you select throughout time. 

Now, rankings may not be the only indicator of success, and they may not be 100% accurate since Google customizes the rankings of the pages in their SERPs for each user. But they are a helpful baseline to see relative changes, and you’ll typical see ranking changes before you see changes in traffic and leads.

Rank Tracking Services

Our Internal Tracking

If you sign up for any of our SEO services or Analytics plans, we’ll monitor your rankings for you for a minimum of 3 months (but oftentimes longer) - either through our agency dashboard or through BrightLocal. Which system we settle on internally will depend on the project and what all we’re doing together.

If we’re not actively working together on SEO, you can pay for our rank tracking a la carte (which also includes setup of your Google Analytics property, and updates if their technology changes, as it has with GA-4.) Or, you can pay for another service like BrightLocal directly (discussed below.)

BrightLocal

Brightlocal costs $29/mo for their lowest plan currently, and gets you rank tracking and more. It also has a 14 day free trial.

We recommend this as the top rank tracker for local businesses, because it includes both organic and local rankings.

(Organic rankings are where your website ranks with your website pages in search engines - local rankings are where your GMB listing ranks within the “local” section of any search results.)

WhiteSpark

WhiteSpark's local rank tracking costs $25/mo for their lowest daily rank tracking, and focuses specifically on where your business stands in search results, without the additional tools. 

Other Alternatives

Other rank trackers that include local rankings tend to be significantly more expensive, with RankRanger coming in at $79/mo for its cheapest plan. 

There are some rank trackers which are cheaper, for example Serprobot is significantly cheaper at just $4.99 per month for its lowest plan - but you will not be able to see where your GMB listing ranks in local results, which is pretty essential for anyone working on their local listings.

Is it possible to do SEO without rank tracking?

Sure, you can try to improve your local visibility and market your local business without rank tracking. You can see your website traffic stats with Google Analytics, and your GMB listing stats in your GMB dashboard. 

But you won’t be able to monitor results as well as if you were tracking rankings and knew what was happening with your granular visibility.

If you’re serious about your growth and actively working to increase your visibility in search engines, sign up for a rank tracker today!