what a rank grid shows that a single screenshot cannot

A rank grid is the only picture of your Google Maps position that is true for the whole town instead of one spot.

Hi,

Last time I said there is no single Google Maps rank, only your rank from a spot. So the obvious question is how you measure something that changes street by street. The answer is a rank grid, and once you have seen one you will never trust a screenshot again.

A rank grid is simple. Take one search, your main term, the primary category plus your town. Lay a grid of points across the area you want customers from. Run the same search from every point, on the same day, and write down where your business shows up at each one. Then color the points: green where you are in the top three, yellow where you are close, red where you are not on the first page of the map. Put the result over a map of the town and you have a picture of your visibility that is true everywhere at once.

What it shows you first is the shape. Almost every business I run one for has a green blob around its own address and red everywhere else. That is distance doing its job. The blob is the circle where you are close enough to win on proximity alone. The red is where a competitor is closer and your listing is not strong enough to beat them anyway. The size of the blob is your real market, and it is usually a lot smaller than the owner thinks.

Then it shows you where the money is. Say the grid for a cleaning company in Cambridge is green around Central Square and red across the river in the neighborhoods where the bigger houses are. Every red point in that direction is a customer searching for exactly what she does and never seeing her. Now the work has a direction: the listing, the site pages and the reviews all get pointed at those neighborhoods by name, and the next grid shows whether the green moved that way.

That is the third thing a grid shows: change. One grid is a diagnosis. Two grids, the same search from the same points a month apart, is proof. The green either spread or it did not, and you can see it without reading a report or trusting anyone's word, including mine.

A few things to know when reading one. The grid only measures the one term you ran, so pick the one that brings the money, not the one that flatters you. The points nearest your address will always be the greenest, which is normal, not a win. And a grid run from a competitor's address tells you where their blob ends and yours could begin.

This is why every plan I run starts with a grid before anything is touched, dated, and gets another one every month from the same points. It is in the written plan for that reason: you should see the map change yourself, not read that it did. The Google Maps ranking page walks through how the grid fits into the 90 days.

If you want to see your own grid before deciding anything, the free analysis includes it: where you rank from different spots in your area, what the listing is missing, and what the site should change.

Talk soon,
Brandon

P.S. Want the 3 tips that get you started? They are in the newsletter: sign up here.

P.P.S. If you want me to do it for you, the plan is here: the plan.