What is a rank grid, and why your agency should show you one every month

"We rank #2" is not a fact

When an agency tells you that you rank #2 for "dentist Winter Park", the honest follow-up question is: from where? Local results change with the searcher's location. From your own parking lot you might be #1. Two miles east you might be #6. Four miles south you might not appear at all. One number hides all of that, and it usually hides it in your agency's favor.

What a rank grid is

A rank grid lays a grid of points over your service area, for example seven by seven points spaced half a mile apart, and checks your position for a search from each point. The result is a map of colored circles: green where you are in the top three, yellow where you are on the first page, red where you are invisible.

It is the single most honest picture of local SEO progress there is, because it shows where you are winning and where you are not, and because month over month you can see the green area growing or shrinking.

What it tells you that nothing else does

Your real radius. Most businesses discover they rank well within a mile and disappear beyond it. That is normal; the work is extending it.

Which competitor owns which area. Run the grid for a competitor and you see exactly where their profile beats yours.

Whether the agency is doing anything. If the grid looks the same after three months, ask why.

Where to put the next page. If you are red across a neighborhood you serve, that neighborhood probably needs its own page on your site and its own mention in your profile.

How to read one

Look at the center first. If you are not green at your own address, something is wrong with the profile itself. Then look at the edges: the direction where green fades fastest is where the strongest competitor sits. Compare the grid for your two or three most important searches; they are often very different.

Ask for it

Any agency doing local SEO can produce a rank grid. Ours is in every monthly report, for every location, for the searches you care about. If your current report is a spreadsheet of single positions, ask for the grid. The response tells you a lot.

A worked example

Imagine a dentist in Winter Park. From the office, the practice is #1 for "dentist near me". Move three quarters of a mile toward Baldwin Park and it drops to #5, because a practice on Corrine Drive is closer to that searcher. Move two miles toward Maitland and it disappears entirely, replaced by three practices on 17-92. The single number the old agency reported, "#1", was true from exactly one spot: their own conference room, which happens to be next to the office. The grid shows the practice is winning a circle about a mile across and losing everywhere else, and it shows which competitor owns each direction.

Reading movement over time

The useful comparison is this month's grid against last month's. Green spreading outward means the work is landing. Green shrinking on one side means a competitor got stronger there, usually through reviews or a new location page. A grid that does not change for three months is a report that the agency is not doing much. Keep the monthly images side by side; the story is obvious in seconds.

What moves the grid

Radius grows with prominence: more recent reviews, more consistent citations, more mentions from other local websites. Coverage in a specific direction grows when you have content about that direction: a page for that neighborhood, photos taken there, reviews that mention it, Q&A that references it. Distance you cannot change without another location, which is the honest reason multi-location businesses eventually open a second office rather than trying to rank one profile across a whole county.

Grid settings that matter

Spacing between points should match how far customers travel to you: a quarter mile for a coffee shop, a mile or more for a roofer. Seven by seven is enough for most single-location businesses. Track two or three searches, not twenty; the ones that produce your best customers. Run it monthly on the same day so the comparison is fair.

Using it to plan

If the grid is red across a neighborhood you serve, that neighborhood needs a page on your site and a mention in your profile description. If it is red toward a competitor's location, look at their review count and their photos, then out-work them on both. If it is green only at the center after six months, the profile is fine but the website and citations are not supporting it, and that is where the next quarter's effort goes.