How to read a rank grid

Ask ten owners where they rank on Google Maps and most will do the same thing: search their own service from their own desk, see themselves near the top, and feel fine. That single lookup is the most misleading number in local marketing. You are searching from inside your own building, and Google leans toward nearby businesses, so of course you look good from there. Your customers are not searching from your desk.

Why one lookup lies

Map rankings change with the searcher's location. Someone three streets away sees a different top three than someone across town, because distance is one of the core factors Google weighs. So "where do we rank" has no single answer. The honest answer is a map of answers: here you rank well, over there you disappear.

That map is what a rank grid is. Instead of one search, it runs the same search from a grid of points spread across your service area, then plots your position at each point.

Reading the grid

Each cell in the grid is one simulated searcher standing at that spot. The number is your position in the map results from there, and the colors bucket those positions:

• Green means top three from that point. You are in the map pack, where the calls happen.
• Yellow means close behind, visible but below the pack for most searchers.
• Orange means you are on the list but far enough down that few people ever scroll to you.
• Red means effectively invisible from that location.

One caution before you read further: a grid measures visibility, not revenue. It tells you where you can be found, which is the necessary first step, not the whole story.

The patterns that matter

1. A green island around your address. The most common picture. You win your own block and fade fast with distance. Growth means pushing the green outward through prominence work: reviews, listings, content.
2. A hole where the money is. Strong overall, but weak exactly in the neighborhood you most want. That gap is a target, not a verdict, and it is often the first thing a campaign should aim at.
3. Strong in the wrong direction. Green spreading over areas you do not serve while your real territory reads orange. Usually a service-area or relevance problem worth fixing at the profile level.
4. Movement over time. A single grid is a snapshot. The real signal is the comparison: this month's grid against last month's. Colors shifting from orange toward green across scans is what progress actually looks like, cell by cell.

What to do with it

Run a grid before you spend a dollar on marketing, because it turns a vague worry into a specific map of where you are losing. Then re-run it on a schedule and judge the work by the movement. That is how we report our own client work, and the grid progression in our published case study shows the pattern in the wild.

You can run one on your business right now with our free rank checker. If the picture it paints is the green-island kind, the fix is the steady work described in map pack ranking factors owners can actually act on.