What is a rank grid?
Short answer
A rank grid is a map showing where a business ranks in Google's local results when the same search is run from many evenly spaced points across its service area. Each point carries the position recorded there. It replaces the single ranking number, which is only true for one spot, with a picture of the whole area.
A rank grid is a map of where a business ranks in Google’s local results when the same search is run from many points spread evenly across its service area. You may also hear it called a geo-grid or a ranking heat map. Each point on the map is marked with the position the business held when the search was run from that spot, and the points are usually colored so that strong and weak areas can be seen at a glance.
How to read one
Each point is a separate answer to one question: if a customer standing here searched for this service, where would this business appear? Take a hypothetical roofing company with its yard in Escondido and a grid covering Escondido, San Marcos and the road out toward Valley Center. The points around the yard might show first and second. Toward San Marcos the numbers climb to fifth and sixth. On the far western points the company might not be found at all.
The part of the map I look at first is the band where the business sits just outside the top three. Those are the places where a modest improvement puts the listing in front of customers. I pay less attention to summary figures such as an average position, because an average can stay flat while the map underneath it changes shape.
Why one ranking check isn’t enough
A single check tells you your position at one point, and that point is usually your own office. Google works out local results separately for each searcher’s location, so a business has as many rankings as it has places to search from. That’s also why your ranking changes depending on where you search from. The grid exists to show the spread.
What goes into setting one up
The choices below need to stay the same from one run to the next, or the comparison means nothing.
| Choice | What to consider |
|---|---|
| Search term | One grid per term. “AC repair” and “furnace installation” will produce different maps. |
| Area covered | The places you want work from, with enough margin to see where you drop off. |
| Spacing of points | Closer together in dense neighborhoods, wider in spread-out parts of the county. |
| Business tracked | Your profile, and ideally the competitors who appear above you at the weak points. |
What a rank grid can’t tell you
A rank grid shows positions, not customers. The searches are simulated from set coordinates, so a real customer’s result can differ slightly with their device, the time of day and the exact words they type.
It’s also a snapshot. Local results shift a little from day to day without anyone changing anything, so a single point moving by one place is noise. And a better position isn’t a booked job, which is why I read grids next to call counts and the performance numbers in Google Business Profile.
A grid says nothing about why you rank where you do, either. It shows where the problem is. Working out the cause takes a comparison with the businesses outranking you at those points.
How I use rank grids
Every change I make gets measured against one. I run a grid before touching anything, so there’s a baseline. I change one thing. About two weeks later I run the same grid with the same settings and put the two maps side by side. If the map improved, the change stays. If it didn’t, you hear that from me. The routine depends on changing only one thing at a time, and it’s what I mean by local rank tracking.