A local rank grid is a way of measuring where a business ranks in Google Maps or the local pack from many points across an area, shown as a map of coloured numbers. It reveals how visibility changes with the searcher’s location, which a single tracked ranking cannot.
How a local rank grid works
A tool lays a grid of points over a map, for example seven by seven or nine by nine, centred on your business or on an area you serve. For each point it runs your chosen keyword as if the searcher were standing exactly there, records your position in the map results and colours the point: typically green for the top three, amber further down and red where you do not appear in the results checked. Repeat the scan each month with the same settings and you can compare grids side by side.
The settings matter. Spacing between points might be a few hundred metres in a dense city centre or several kilometres for a rural service area. The keyword should be one a real customer would type, without your business name. At the time of writing (October 2026), tools offering grid tracking include Local Falcon, BrightLocal and Places Scout, and most report an average position and a share-of-visibility figure alongside the map.
Why it matters
Local results depend heavily on proximity: how close the business is to the person searching, or to the place they name. A conventional rank tracker records one position from one location, which can look excellent from your own postcode while customers a mile away never see you.
In London the effect is pronounced. Businesses are packed so tightly that map rankings can change within a few streets, so a dental practice in Clapham might dominate around its own block yet barely appear in Battersea or Brixton. A grid spread across the boroughs you serve shows that pattern clearly and turns a vague question, such as whether you are visible in Wandsworth, into something you can measure. For firms covering several towns, the same method shows where a service area business profile earns visibility and where it does not.
Common mistakes
- Choosing a grid so large that every outer point is red, then treating that as failure. Nobody ranks everywhere.
- Combining a grid with a keyword that already contains a place name, such as “dentist Clapham”, which mixes two different signals.
- Comparing scans run with different grid sizes, spacing or centre points.
- Reacting to a single scan. Results fluctuate from day to day, so look at the trend across several.
- Using grid results to justify virtual offices or extra addresses, which breaches Google’s guidelines and risks suspension.
How to act on it
Pick three to five keywords that represent your core services and run a baseline grid for each, sized to the area you can realistically serve. Save the settings and reuse them every time. Look for the edge where green turns red: that boundary is your current reach.
Then work on what moves it. Strengthen prominence through reviews, links from local organisations and consistent citations, and improve relevance by making your website and Google Business Profile clearer about each service. Re-run the grids monthly and compare. Grids are one of the measures I use in my local SEO service, because they show progress in the places customers actually are rather than at a single point on the map.