Almost all my clients are small businesses with a local customers, often not even interested in leads they can't service from more than 30miles away. When I am asked to do SEO we agree a list of words which might form putative search queries, we work them into the site text and I search for three word combinations on google.co.uk in incognito mode and record the position that my site comes in the results I get. Then I can track the improvements week to week to demonstrate my talent and usefulness to my client, and sometimes get other useful info as well.

Is there a better way of measuring results? In particular I have to put in local geographical words, whereas in the real world google will likely know where the searcher is situated, so that's going to skew my results. How do other people measure results?

Edited October 17, 20187 yr by TimW

Google Analytics and Google Search console are the tools you need.

15 hours ago, span said:

Google Analytics and Google Search console are the tools you need.

well yeah, except that google webmaster stuff is almost impossible to navigate through and doesn't give me the info I want when I get there. There are stats on the hosting account too which are interesting, but this is a more specific problem.

Today fe I am looking at a caterers site. We don't really care about total hits or numbers of backlinks or referrers or how long they stay or what language they use.  We want to know if local people google to find a caterer for a wedding or a business event or private celebration are they going to see my site in the results? So I try to test exactly that.

What does google actually know about location? There's the local google site (eg I use google.co.uk), there's the ip address location (which is often way out), there's gps location if you are using a mobile and allow it, there's stuff like your stated location on Facebook (in my case Somerset, Texas), and presumably secondary stuff like search history. How does that add up to affect search results? Are they all used even?

Edited October 18, 20187 yr by TimW

32 minutes ago, TimW said:

What does google actually know about location? There's the local google site (eg I use google.co.uk), there's the ip address location (which is often way out), there's gps location if you are using a mobile and allow it, there's stuff like your stated location on Facebook (in my case Somerset, Texas), and presumably secondary stuff like search history. How does that add up to affect search results? Are they all used even?

Google knows quite a lot, for example if you look at how Google Business works with mapping. In this instance they know the physical address and geo coordinates of a given business thanks to us all listing our companies on their maps. Searches with "near me" would work using the geo of the device, mobiles are a lot more accurate, my IP thinks i'm in the next own over as you mentioned.

I've been experimenting with microdata for a lot of years now, and one thing I have learnt is you can apply the same principal of Google Maps listings to an actual web page, as in giving it geo coordinates and a coverage area (if required). In the caterers case you could add geo coordinates of the business and a coverage area of 30 miles (48280 ish meters) as the crow flies. My results so far testing this is that a given web page can return in the search results for a town they never mention on their website but it is in proximity of their business and inside their coverage area. In addition I have seen an increase in traffic resulting in "near me" search terms. I'm not saying you'll outrank someone who has single location targeted, but top 10 when you don't even mention a place is not a bad side effect.

Edit: Forgot to say, microdata can also help clean up location confusion. If you're in Somerset, Texas and I'm in say Taunton, Somerset who should come first for "caterers in Somerset"?

Edited October 18, 20187 yr by BrowserBugs

Google My Business is one of the best ways to tell google where you are. Not only will you appear on the maps it will also help your local SEO.

Combine this with your Google console and you will have excellent reports on how well you rank locally.

And I'd bin GA and use clicky or piwik. Both are far simpler to use and give much better results.

On 10/18/2018 at 10:24 AM, BrowserBugs said:

.... In the caterers case you could add geo coordinates of the business and a coverage area of 30 miles (48280 ish meters) as the crow flies. My results so far testing this is that a given web page can return in the search results for a town they never mention on their website but it is in proximity of their business and inside their coverage area. In addition I have seen an increase in traffic resulting in "near me" search terms.....

That is really extremely interesting and not something I knew about. thanks for that - I am reading up on it.

Here in Somerset we have an added problem that a 30 mile radius includes parts of south wales which are actually 100 miles away by road but we just have to live with that nonsense.

4 hours ago, TimW said:

That is really extremely interesting and not something I knew about. thanks for that - I am reading up on it.

Here in Somerset we have an added problem that a 30 mile radius includes parts of south wales which are actually 100 miles away by road but we just have to live with that nonsense.

Pm me for real life example if interested. I don't post clients sites on here.

Hello, Tim!
In order to handle SEO data, to track your competitors, their actions and success, I advise using such SEO and Marketing tools as Ahrefs, SEMRush, SimilarWeb. Their free opportunities are limited, but just try. I hope they will be useful for you.

On 10/18/2018 at 9:52 AM, TimW said:

Today fe I am looking at a caterers site. We don't really care about total hits or numbers of backlinks or referrers or how long they stay or what language they use.  We want to know if local people google to find a caterer for a wedding or a business event or private celebration are they going to see my site in the results? So I try to test exactly that.

In Google Analytics if you have a Search Console property attached will help here, you can track average positions for terms by country etc. As @Katarina Grumy pointed out SEMrush is pretty good for this sort of thing, but honestly you can drive yourself crazy as no data is 100% accurate.

For testing local Mobile Moxie SERP Test is pretty cool, you get 5 free checks a day (paid available) to set where you want to test from (country/county/town) on up to 2 devices. Really good for tests like "caterers near me"