Phil Risher shows why checking your Google My Business ranking from your own location gives you wrong data, then demonstrates BrightLocal, a tool that tests rankings from specific zip codes instead. He walks through how to track local service pack placements and compares the results to what Google actually shows you.
Are searching for where you rank online. I'm going to show you in this video how to see where you rank in a specific geographical location. A lot of times people just go to Google and they type in whatever the keyword is, and they try to see where they rank. This is. It's not accurate. What Google does is it takes your current location of where you're literally physically sitting, whether that's with your phone or where your computer is designated, as far as the location goes, and it's going to search in that specific area. The reason that this is not accurate is because if you're searching for your business, for example, and your business is located in a specific area, and you're in a different area, the results are not accurate. And so I'm going to show you why they're not accurate. And then I'm going to show you how to find where you rank on a neutral playing field, which is what you should be looking at when you're looking for ranking keywords. So when you go to Google, you can just go here and type in carpet cleaning, for example, let's say carpet cleaning. And you want to search for Atlanta. Okay, so when you search this, yes, it's going to pull up Atlanta right here in the map. And yes, it's going to show Atlanta people in the local service pack. But what this is showing is when I search for this keyword, carpet cleaning, Atlanta, Georgia, it's as if I'm searching for this keyword where I'm physically located, which is in Maryland. And so this is not the actual results that people are going to see if they're located in Atlanta, Georgia. Because if we take out Atlanta, Georgia, and we just search for carpet cleaning, watch what happens. It pulls up Maryland. It does not pull up Atlanta, Georgia. And this is why it's so important that you use a neutral search when you're looking for keywords in a specific area. And so let's look for carpet cleaning in Atlanta, Georgia, using this tool. And I'll link to this down below because it's free. It's called Bright Local. And what this allows you to do is to search a term. So carpet cleaning in a specific location. The reason that this is good is because obviously Atlanta, Georgia, or whatever the city is, is huge. But maybe you only want to rank for specific zip codes or you want to track your ranking for specific zip codes in a specific area. This allows you to search in that location specifically. So we'll do Atlanta again, and then what we'll be able to do is click Check search results and then we can look at the first, second, third page. What this does is it sets our location as Atlanta, Georgia and it searches carpet cleaning. And then we're going to be able to see here how this looks. So if you see the map even looks different because it's pulling in specifically in Atlanta, Georgia. And so obviously as you can see, these are the results for specifically Atlanta. So if you're searching for keywords in your specific area, then you should go here and you can try this out. I think they give you like 10 or 15 for free. We also are partnered with BrightLocal and we use them and we track up to 100 keywords on five different platforms. So 500 keywords. And we have this free local SEO report where you can get a detailed report of your business. And it's free. You could do this right on our website. I'll put the link down below. But even if you don't use this, you can pull up this tool, you know, maybe once, I think every day it gives you 10 or 15 and test it out maybe once a month just have a pop up to go and test some keywords and see where you rank. This is a really good way to track your rankings, but also it allows you to see if your current digital marketing company is doing the right things for the keywords that you want. So we do this a lot when we meet with clients, but we say, okay, you currently doing marketing with someone? Well, when we search for carpet cleaning in your specific area and you could even go more granular and just take the zip code of their actual business. Like if someone's standing in your zip code and where do you rank? And we pull this up and we can say, okay, well first you don't rank in this local service pack. So we need to figure out a strategy for that. Which we have a strategy, we made videos about that before, but we need to figure this out. And then also down here, your actual website is not ranking for these specific zip codes. So we need to figure out a strategy for that. Maybe the SEO that you're paying for is not doing what you want it to do based on the keywords that you currently have, which is really important. If you're talking with marketing company, they're talking about SEO and all this stuff, you should have a list of keywords, services and target areas that you discuss with them. So, so that way they can track the progress on those keywords and target areas. So if this is something that you're interested in, I'll put a link down below, you can schedule some time to talk with us. We do free strategy sessions about your business if you like. Content about growing local service businesses, digital marketing technology. That's the type of content we share, so be sure to hit like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
