How We Measure Local Search Visibility

The Geo-Grid

For every category we measure, we build a fixed lattice of 90 or more points across the relevant part of Edmonton, spaced roughly 1.8 kilometres apart. From each point, we run a real local-finder search for the category in question and record every business returned, not just the top result. A business's score is its Share of Local Voice: the proportion of those 90+ points where it appears in the top 3, the top 10, and the top 20, rather than a single rank pulled from a single location. This is the only way to answer the question a business owner actually cares about, which is not “where do I rank,” but “where in the city do I actually show up, and where do I not.”

The Full-Market SERP Pull

Alongside the grid, we run a full-market SERP pull: hundreds of queries specific to the category and the market, pulled for both desktop and mobile, to a top-20 depth in organic results, with map-pack presence recorded separately. This is where head-term concentration, device divergence, and the overlap or non-overlap between map-pack and organic winners actually show up. The grid tells us where visibility holds geographically; the SERP pull tells us which keywords carry the volume worth competing for and how the map pack and organic layers relate to each other across the whole category.

Why Two Instruments, Not One

A citywide keyword pull run from a single location and a geo-grid run from ninety are not interchangeable and neither replaces the other. The keyword pull is the only way to see head-term demand concentration, SERP-feature prevalence, and desktop-versus-mobile divergence across hundreds of queries, none of which a grid, which repeats a small number of category terms from many points, is built to capture. The grid is the only way to see whether a ranking holds up geographically, and in every market we have measured this way, businesses exist that place well in one instrument and are effectively absent from the other. Reporting only one of the two produces a market picture that is, at best, half true.

We also record device separately at every step. Mobile and desktop searches can return different organic results and different local-pack behavior for the same query, and a report that does not distinguish the two risks recommending a fix for the wrong surface.

What We Do Not Claim

We do not claim a specific ranking position is guaranteed, and we do not treat a single month’s grid as proof of a trend on its own; a trend is something we point to only once at least two re-measurements confirm the same direction. We do not report vanity metrics, such as a raw number-one count, without the tracked search volume behind them, because a large count with little volume behind it is not the same thing as market share, and treating it as equivalent is one of the more common ways an SEO report misleads a client without technically lying.

Before and After, Not Once

We run both the grid and the SERP pull once before an engagement begins, establishing a dated baseline, and again every month afterward, on the same points and the same keyword set. A monthly report from this practice is a comparison between two dated measurements, never a summary of activity performed in between. If a claim of improvement cannot be pointed to a specific baseline and a specific re-measurement, it is not something we will say.

Verifying the Measurement Yourself

A client working with us can see the same grid points and the same keyword list we are working from, and can run any individual search from the same coordinates we used to check the result themselves. This is a deliberate choice: a measurement that only we can see is not meaningfully different from a claim, and the entire point of building this practice around measurement rather than reputation is that the client should not have to take our interpretation on faith.

Our Own Scoreboard

We hold ourselves to the same standard we apply to clients. Our baseline measurement for our own ranking on “edmonton seo” and the surrounding keyword cluster was captured in July 2026, and it will be re-measured and published on this page monthly from that point forward, as a living case study of our own visibility rather than a claim we make about ourselves without evidence.

The Instruments Behind the Method

The grid and SERP-pull instruments we use here were not built for this agency specifically; they are the same geo-grid rank tracking and citywide competitor mapping software that DecodeLocal builds and ships as a standalone product for other local businesses and agencies to run themselves. We use that tooling internally, applied by hand to every Edmonton engagement, interpreted against this specific market's geography rather than handed to a client as a raw export. The software is the instrument; the measurement and the judgment applied to it are the practice.

What Changes When a Market Changes

Edmonton's local search results are not static. New businesses open, review profiles grow, Google adjusts how it weights signals, and a business that closes a genuine gap this month can open a new one next month simply because a competitor responded. Monthly re-measurement exists precisely because a one-time audit describes a market that has typically already moved on by the time the recommendations are acted on. Treating measurement as ongoing rather than a single event at the start of an engagement is the difference between a report and a practice.

See this method applied in full to a real Edmonton category in our case study measuring the Edmonton dentist market, or read the practice overview on our main Edmonton SEO page.