Tracking the right key metrics for local SEO success is essential to understanding what's working, what's not, and how to refine your strategy for better results.
As you monitor your local search performance over time, you can use the data to help you refine your local search engine optimization strategy and achieve better results.
While the ultimate goal of local SEO is to boost leads and revenue, there are many other metrics you should factor in to determine how well different tactics are working.
The best way to track several important local SEO metrics at once and monitor your overall performance in local search results is to use a local rank tracker, like Local Falcon.
Get Your Comprehensive Local SEO Audit
10 Key Metrics for Tracking Local SEO Success:
- Local Pack Rankings
- Organic Rankings
- Website Traffic
- Google Business Profile Insights
- Local Citations
- Customer Reviews and Ratings
- Local Backlinks
- Local Search Traffic
- Conversion Rate
- AI Search Visibility
- AI Brand Sentiment
1. Local Pack Rankings
Monitor your business's rankings in the local pack (the Google Maps results section at the top of Google search results). Improvements here can lead to greatly increased visibility, traffic, leads, and conversions more so than any other local ranking metric.
Local Falcon allows you to check something called your Share of Local Voice (SoLV) score, which represents how often you show up in the local pack.
As you implement local search optimizations, monitoring your SoLV score is one of the best ways to see whether they are working or not the higher your SoLV is, the better you're doing in local search!
2. Organic Rankings
Keep an eye on your website's organic search rankings for local keywords. Tools like Google Search Console can help you track these rankings over time.
3. Website Traffic
Analyze the amount of traffic coming to your website from organic search, especially from local searches. Again, Google Search Console is a great tool for this.
4. Google Business Profile Performance
Use the insights provided by Google Business Profile to track desirable actions taken by potential customers, such as clicks to your website, requests for directions, and phone calls.
Local Falcon's Falcon Guard reports include GBP perfromance metrics, so you can see them without ever leaving your dashboard.
5. Local Citations
Monitor your business's local citations (online mentions of your business name, address, phone number (NAP), and other key info) to ensure consistency and accuracy across different platforms.
There are various local SEO tools that help you monitor and manage your local citations across different online directories and other platforms, such as navigation apps.
If you see that your local citations are inconsistent, and that your local SEO performance has dropped, there could be a correlation, so you should take actions to fix the citations promptly.
6. Customer Reviews and Ratings
Keep track of your business's reviews and ratings on platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Positive reviews can improve your local SEO efforts, and getting more reviews or a higher average review score than competitors can help you jump past them in local rankings.
Local Falcon lets you easily track your reviews on Google Business Profile, as well as compare your total number of reviews and overall review score side by side with all competitors found in your local area.
7. Local Backlinks
Measure the number and quality of backlinks, or links back to your website, from other locally relevant websites. Backlinks are a strong local ranking factor for Google and other search engines.
8. Local Search Traffic
Use tools like Google Search Console to track the amount of traffic coming to your site from local search queries.
9. Conversion Rate
Measure the rate at which visitors from local searches take a desired action on your website, such as booking an appointment or contacting you.
By regularly tracking these metrics, you can gauge the effectiveness of your local SEO efforts and make adjustments to improve your visibility and reach in local search results.
10. AI Search Visibility
Track your AI search visibility to ensure your business appears in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT answers, and other AI-generated responses.
Local Falcon offers AI visibility tracking for leading AI search platforms, allowing to measure your Share of AI Voice (SAIV) alongside your traditional local rankings for Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect.
11. AI Brand Sentiment
Monitor how AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and others describe and portray your business when responding to local search queries. AI brand sentiment goes beyond simply appearing in AI-generated answers — it measures whether those mentions are positive, neutral, or negative, and how your brand is characterized compared to competitors.
Local Falcon's AI brand sentiment tracking lets you see exactly how leading AI platforms are talking about your business, so you can take steps to improve your reputation and ensure AI tools are recommending you over the competition. The better your Buyer Persuasion Score (BPS), the more likely potential customers are to choose your business when AI search results influence their decision.
Tracking and Measuring Local SEO Success with Local Ranking Reports
As we've already touched on, one of the best tools for monitoring your local SEO performance is a local rank tracker, more specifically, Local Falcon.
Tracking your local search performance with Local Falcon can be done using a few different types of local ranking reports, including:
- Scan Reports
- Competitor Reports
- Trend Reports
- Keyword Reports
- Location Reports
1. Scan Reports
Scan Reports allow you to run a local search ranking scan for any business location and keyword using a desired Map Scan Radius and Grid Size, which determine the area of the scan and how many data points are used in it.
These local ranking reports give you a birds-eye view of your business's performance in the local pack at any point in time (whenever the scan is run). They provide various metrics you can use to evaluate the success of your local SEO efforts, including your Average Rank Position, Average Total Rank Position, and Share of Local Voice.
Additionally, Scan Reports feature Local Falcon's built-in AI tool for local SEO, Falcon AI, which provides AI-powered analysis of your business listing's overall health and offers actionable recommendations for optimizing it and outranking vulnerable competitors.
2. Competitor Reports
Competitor Reports show local ranking data for all the competitors found in a scan, making it easy to identify top competitors and spot opportunities to outrank nearby competitors.
For example, you can look at the SoLV score of competitors just above you in the rankings to see how much you need to increase your SoLV score by in order to jump up past them.
As you implement local search optimizations, you can keep checking Competitor Reports to see if you're climbing the rankings.
3. Trend Reports
When you run local rank tracking scans for the same business locations and keywords over time, Local Falcon automatically generates Trend Reports to show you their performance over time at a glance.
These Trend Reports also feature Falcon AI's report analysis and recommendations for how to improve your ranking based on the aggregated data from all the scans used to generate the report.
4. Keyword Reports
If you're doing local rank tracking for multiple business locations, Keyword Reports let you see all your scan data for one particular keyword that you're tracking across different locations.
This type of local ranking report can be useful for multi-location businesses that you want to rank higher for the same keywords across locations, as you can track the average performance of all locations for any given keyword.
5. Location Reports
Location Reports show you local ranking data for all the different keywords you've run scans for for a single business location, providing a good snapshot of the location's overall performance in local rankings across various keywords.
Wrapping Up
Achieving local SEO success isn't a one-and-done kind of thing. It's a continuum that you must constantly monitor to iterate on and improve your strategy.
By tracking key local SEO metrics, like those discussed above, you can gain valuable insights into what's working and what's not, helping you refine your optimization strategy and boost your performance in local search over time.
Local Falcon can help you track many of the most important metrics, including Google Maps and AI search performance, and provide in-depth local ranking reports to help evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy and achieve better results.
By using Local Falcon to regularly analyze local search metrics and making adjustments based on the data, you can greatly improve your visibility and reach in local search results, ultimately driving more leads and revenue for your business.
Falcon AI even takes some of the manual work out of monitoring your local SEO performance by providing instant listing analysis and optimization recommendations.
So, what are you waiting for? Start using Local Falcon today to measure your local SEO success!
Get Your Comprehensive Local SEO Audit
