Understand the performance of your local SEO strategy by tracking all of the following:

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Why tracking local SEO performance matters
Local SEO is the practice of promoting all online aspects of a local business to improve its local and organic search engine visibility and multiple performance metrics. These metrics vary, based on unique business goals, but common ones for most local businesses include rankings, traffic, engagement, conversions, sales, reputation, Net Promoter Score, and more.

Local businesses engage in a variety of promotional practices, such as content publication and marketing, local business listing development and management, link and citation development, and reputation management in order to become competitive in the geographic markets they serve. The success of each marketing effort can only be fully evaluated when it can be tracked.

For example, if your local business launches a new review acquisition campaign, you would want to measure return on investment (ROI) by tracking whether the time spent actively requesting reviews from customers is yielding an increase in reviews received vs. a previous date range in which your business wasn’t asking for this valuable form of content. You could also measure additional outcomes, such as whether an improved review count is positively impacting your listings’ visibility in Google local packs, finders, and Maps.

The more competitive your local markets, the more necessary your investment in local SEO is likely to become. A strong local SEO effort is important because of its direct impacts on how consumers discover and choose your business for transactions.

It’s essential to note that local SEO and local search marketing campaigns continuously evolve to serve emerging trends in online consumer behavior. For example, when large-scale surveys like this one from GatherUp find that more than half of consumers are looking for local business recommendations on social media platforms instead of only looking at traditional sources like Google’s local packs, it’s an indicator that your business needs to develop a strong presence across a variety of social communities.

Another example would be how the 2024 Google API leak brought new local SEO industry focus to the topic of the impact of user behavior signals on rank. This might influence your business to devote more effort to optimizing your Google Business Profiles so that they are earning a higher rate of engagement.

While not every outcome of every local SEO task can be tracked, it’s ideal to track whichever metrics you can to get the fullest possible picture of returns on your investments.

9 core metrics to track local SEO success
Understand the performance of your local SEO strategy by tracking all of the following:

1. Local business reputation
   Customer satisfaction makes or breaks local brands, and tracking review sentiment across time on your local business listings is fundamental to measuring performance. There are multiple reputation management software offerings on today’s market. Look for those that enable you to track the following:

Volume of reviews received, month-over-month and year-over-year
Trending sentiment in incoming reviews
Rate of owner responses to reviews
Average star ratings across time
By measuring all of the above, your brand will be able to understand the level of satisfaction customers are experiencing at each branch of your business, whether new problems are emerging at specific branches and need to be addressed to restore a positive reputation, the efficiency with which you are responding to incoming reviews, and how your overall customer service quality is translating into the shorthand of an average star rating on each major review platform.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
   Instead of relying on reviews to track customer satisfaction, NPS is a market research metric that employs survey questions to engage with consumers. Respondents’ answers are then fed into a formula to produce a benchmarking figure. Many reputation management software brands can help you calculate your NPS, or you can use and in-house survey and the following formula to arrive at a figure:

Total % of promoters – total % of detractors = net promoter score

For example, if your survey asks customers how likely they are to recommend your business to family and friends, you might discover that 80% answer “yes” and 20% answer “no”. By the above formula, your NPS would be 60 out of a total possible score of 100. A low Net Promoter Score is an indication that your business needs to improve consumer experiences to earn a greater degree of satisfaction and loyalty. NPS is also considered to be predictive of whether a local business can achieve longevity, making it an important success metric.

3. Google local pack, local finder, and Maps rankings
   Google’s local results are dominant in local consumer journeys, and winning increased visibility across their three main local interfaces can have outstanding impacts on your traffic, conversions, sales, leads, and other critical metrics.

However, it’s vital to approach any discussion of local rankings with the following fact in mind: there are no static #1 local rankings in Google’s system. Google customizes the search engine results that each user sees based on their physical location at the time that they search. Because of this, don’t get bogged down by a goal of wanting to be #1. Instead, focus on overall trends of visibility across time.

Some of the most popular tools currently on the market for tracking local rankings offer gridded, numbered displays superimposed on maps that allow you to emulate a customer’s location and see which businesses are appearing for them, either in the local pack/local finder results or the related but unique Google Maps results. Other software offers similar data, but formatted as a chart instead of as a grid. As you evaluate different tools, the most important metric to look for is whether they can track performance over time. This will allow you to understand whether your local SEO and marketing efforts are resulting in increased or decreased visibility in Google’s system in the context of your competitive market over the course of months and years.

4. Organic rankings
   In addition to understanding the visibility of your business in Google’s local results, you must also track the performance of your digital assets in Google’s organic results. These assets could include your website, social media profiles, features of your business on third-party websites, and any other content which Google returns as a result when a searcher looks up any keyword phrase that is important to your business.

For example, if a core keyword phrase for your company is “best pizza in chicago”, it will be vital for you to know what the public is seeing when they search this way. Is your website coming up highly in the organic results for this search? Which page of your website is coming up – is it the strongest page for meeting the intent of the searcher? Are you being outranked by something like a 10-best list on Yelp.com, and does this mean that you need to get included on that page for optimal visibility to the public? Do you have rich media appearing in the results, such as videos from your YouTube channel?

There are multiple software products currently available for tracking many different metrics related to organic search, but the most popular free product is Google Search Console. It reports on your site’s search traffic and performance, and alerts you to issues that need to be fixed. Read The SEO’s Guide to Google Search Console for a crash course in using this valuable product.

5. Website traffic
   Website traffic is simply defined as the amount of visits your website is receiving. This metric becomes most useful in conjunction with other forms of measurement, such as the rate at which a certain level of traffic results in conversions or sales.

Google Analytics is Google’s main free product for measuring website traffic. Read How to use Google Analytics 4: A complete guide for a comprehensive tutorial on how to set up, configure, and understand the results of this dashboard.

There’s a common misconception that any form of local search marketing that brings in traffic is a success, but sophisticated brands understand that the more meaningful goal is earning the right traffic – traffic from people who are qualified to become customers, recommend you to their circle, and come back from repeat transactions.

6. Google Business Profile Insights
   The New Merchant Experience dashboard you are shown when you search for your business while signed into the Google account that controls your Google Business Profiles reports on a variety of useful metrics, including:

Clicks from your Google Business Profile to your website
Clicks-to-call from your Google Business Profile to your listed phone number
Requests from your Google Business Profile for driving directions to your locations
Views of your business profile
Bookings
All of these measurements are located in the Performance tab of your New Merchant Experience dashboard, and each one is useful when tracked over time. It’s good news when these signals are trending upwards as a result of your local SEO efforts, but a downtrend could indicate that a competitor is getting ahead of you in the local search results, possible problems with your listings such as suspensions, and that you have work ahead of you to get the needle pointing upward again.

7. Structured citation health
   To achieve an optimal level of online discoverability, your local business will be creating profiles in a variety of major local business indexes, including but not limited to Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, Nextdoor, YP.com, etc. The main purpose of these listings is to be a visible result wherever a consumer might be searching for what your business is and does. These formal listings are technically referred to in the local SEO industry as “structured citations”.

The major pain point of structured citations is that they cannot be treated as one-and-done assets. Once they are created, they must be maintained for accuracy. The degree of maintenance is dependent on the complexity of your local business model. If you are a single location brick-and-mortar business that is unlikely to move locations or change its other core contact data, then the foundational accuracy of your listings across the web may require only minor maintenance. If, by contrast, you are in charge of the local SEO for a multi-location enterprise or a company with a multi-practitioner or multi-department model, scaling maintenance quickly becomes a serious challenge as new locations open, close, or move and partners and departments alter over time.

Managing the health of your citations is critical to avoiding reputation damage, which can directly impact profitability. For example, if a branch of your pizza franchise changes its hours of operation and does not update its citations across the local business listing ecosystem, then customers will be inconvenienced by encountering inaccurate information and arriving at closed doors. They may then take to the web to write negative reviews about their bad experience with your brand, eroding your average star rating and your efforts to be trusted and chosen within a community. Fortunately, there are multiple business listing management software products on the market to assist you with maintaining citation health at scale.