How to find out where your business ranks locally

A business’s position in Google’s local search results can change depending on where the person searching is located.
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For example, a business might rank highly when someone searches from a location close to its premises, but appear much lower when the same search is made a few miles away.
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Insites Local Grid helps you see this variation by checking a business’s Google local ranking from multiple locations across its surrounding area.
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Google's local search results can change depending on where the person making the search is physically located. This means two people searching for exactly the same keyword can see different businesses and different ranking positions simply because they're searching from different places.
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Local Grid is designed to show you these differences.

When you run a Local Grid check, Insites places the business at the centre of a geo-grid, with multiple individual search points positioned around its local area.
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Each point represents a separate Google local search made from that exact geographic location.
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Think of it as virtually standing on each point of the map, taking out your phone and searching Google for the selected keyword. Local Grid then records where the business ranks from that location before repeating the search from every other point on the grid.

For example, a business could rank:

All of these rankings can be correct at the same time.
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This is also different from manually searching Google for a keyword and adding a location to your search. If you're physically sitting in Birmingham and searching for a business in Manchester, the results you see aren't necessarily the same as those seen by someone actually searching from Manchester.
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Local Grid gives you a much more realistic picture by checking the ranking as though the searcher were physically located at each point on the grid, showing where the business has strong local visibility and where competitors are outperforming it.

Google uses the searcher's location as one of its core local ranking factors, alongside relevance and prominence. This means simply typing a town, city, or neighbourhood into your search isn't the same as physically searching from that location - proximity to the actual searcher still shapes what Google shows.
But location is only part of the picture. A regular Google search on your own device is also shaped by:

Local Grid removes these variables. It runs each search as a neutral, "fresh" query. That means no logged in account, no browsing history, no cookies or cache - it's using the precise GPS coordinates of each point on the grid rather than an estimated device location. Each point represents what Google would show to an anonymous searcher standing at that exact spot, at that moment.

Crucially, it also checks multiple points at once, not just one. So rather than a single snapshot from a single location, you get a spread of results across the whole grid - showing you how rankings shift as the search location moves, even though the keyword stays exactly the same.

For example, if you're sitting in Birmingham and search for a keyword relating to a business in Manchester, Google still factors in your real location and personal search context. Local Grid instead checks rankings from clean, GPS precise coordinates within the Manchester grid itself - which is why the two can show meaningfully different results even for an identical search term.

Local Grid automatically adjusts the area covered based on the level of competition surrounding the business.

For a business in a densely populated area with lots of nearby competitors, such as a hairdresser in a city centre, the grid may cover a relatively small area.

For a business serving a wider or more rural area, such as a mobile mechanic, the grid can spread across a much larger area.
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You can also override the automatically selected area and choose the grid coverage manually.

The rankings shown on the grid relate to a specific keyword or search term.

Insites' AI Keyword Planner can suggest relevant keywords based on the business and its services, removing the need to manually research which terms to check.

Changing the keyword may produce a very different grid because a business may have strong local visibility for one service but much weaker visibility for another.

Local Grid doesn't only show the business being audited. It also identifies the businesses appearing alongside it across the 25 or more search locations.

These competitors are displayed in a table and ranked by Threat Level.
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Threat Level takes into account factors including how consistently a competitor appears across the grid and the positions it achieves. This helps identify the businesses that are competing most strongly for visibility across the local area.
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You can highlight individual competitors on the grid to compare their visibility with the audited business and identify where they are outperforming it.
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Relevant competitors can also be added for ongoing tracking in future audits.

Looking at the complete grid can help answer questions such as:

Re-running Local Grid over time can also help demonstrate changes in local search visibility following optimisation work.
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A single ranking only tells you what happened from one location at one point in time.

For local search, that can hide a large part of the picture.
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Local Grid checks the same keyword from 25 locations around the business and turns those results into an easy-to-understand visual map.

This gives you a much clearer picture of where a business is visible, where it isn't, and which competitors are winning the local search results in those areas.