A How question

How does an SEO company measure local search performance?

3 min read Cites 2 sources

It measures two layers: how visible your business is in local results across the area you serve, and what people do after they find you, from calls and direction requests to inquiries on your website. Much of the second layer comes from the Performance report in your Google Business Profile. Its numbers have specific definitions, including the fact that they combine unpaid and paid activity, and a useful report states those definitions instead of presenting the figures as plain counts of customers.

Why one ranking number does not describe local visibility

In local results, where the searcher is matters. Google’s guide to local ranking describes it this way: “Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.” It adds: “If a customer doesn’t share where they are, Google uses what it knows about their location.” The same search can therefore return a different set of businesses on the other side of town. A single position checked from one spot says little about the rest of your service area.

To deal with this, a company can check positions from several points across the area, for example with third-party tools that lay a grid over a map and record where your business appears at each point. The result is a sample from that tool, taken at a given time, rather than a figure Google reports. It is useful for seeing where you are visible and where you fade out, and for watching that pattern change over months.

What the Business Profile Performance report counts

Google’s page on Business Profile performance defines each metric, and the definitions matter when you read a report. Views count people, not page loads: the metric counts unique visitors, and Google adds: “A person can only be counted once a day.” Calls are defined as “The number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile.” That is a click, not a completed conversation. Directions count requests for directions, website clicks count clicks on the website link, and searches show the terms people used to find your business. Google notes that the searches metric “is updated at the start of each month” and “might take up to 5 days to show up.”

Two conditions apply to all of it. Performance data “is available only for verified Business Profiles.” And, most important for an SEO report: “Performance data includes views, searches, and actions from both organic search results and Google Ads.” If you also run local ads, growth in profile calls or website clicks may come from the ads rather than from the SEO work, and the company should say how it separates the two.

What happens on your website

For visitors who click through, the company measures the pages they land on, especially location and service-area pages, and the actions they take there: form submissions, quote requests, bookings, and calls from the site. Those actions only appear in analytics once they are set up as key events, so agreeing which actions count comes first. If the company uses call tracking numbers to attribute phone calls, ask how it keeps your business’s own number consistent on your profile and listings.

Reviews as a measurement

Reviews are both part of how local results are ranked and a direct record of customer experience. The company can track the number of reviews, the average rating, how recent they are, and how promptly the business replies. The trend over time is more informative than a total, because a total says nothing about whether customers are still leaving reviews.

How the report should be put together

Ask for a report that keeps the two layers apart: visibility before the click, from position checks and profile views, and actions after it, from calls, directions, website clicks, and inquiries on your site. Ask for each figure to be compared with a baseline recorded at the start, for the source of every number to be named, and for paid and unpaid activity to be separated wherever your profile data mixes them.

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