We have already spoken about choosing keywords, and any given clinic will typically have primary and secondary service and location targets, which you will have recorded on your clinic marketing guide.
So for a dentist in Manchester we might have something like this:
Primary Optimisations
Dentist
Dental clinic
Manchester
Secondary Treatment Optimisations
Dentures
Hygienist
Teeth whitening
Teeth straightening
Invisalign
Secondary Location Optimisations (areas in or around Manchester which we want to target)
Glossop
Trafford
When tracking rankings we’ll combine all of these. So we have 3 locations – Manchester, Glossop and Trafford, and 7 services. For each of the services we’ll monitor rankings for the service alone, “near me”, and each of our 3 locations (see the last guide on understanding search). That gives us 5 variations on each keyword (term alone, near me, manchester, glossop, trafford). We have 7 different service/treatment keywords (dentist, dental clinic, hygienist, teeth whitening, teeth straightening, invisalign) giving a total of 5 x 7 = 35 keyphrases to monitor:
Dentist
Dentist near me
Dentist manchester
Dentist glossop
Dentist trafford
Dentures
Dentures near me
Dentures manchester
Dentures glossop
Dentures trafford
Etc, etc.
Now we need to consider the two different ways of monitoring and measuring a local search: the Local Search Grid and the Rank Tracker.
There are two different ways of monitoring local searches. The first is a Local Search Grid. The Local Search Grid measures our rank for a particular term (e.g. “dentist near me”) at various different locations on a grid. Typically we set our clinic in the centre of the grid, and specify the distance apart we want the grid points to be depending on what’s most relevant for us. This gives us a “heatmap” of where we rank, like this:
You’ll need to experiment a little to find the grid size that’s right for you. For a rural clinic you might be working with a grid 20 miles wide, whereas for an inner-city clinic a mile wide might be more than enough. As your SEO reach increases, you may need to change the grid settings to continue to get useful information.
There are various grid ranking tools available. Brightlocal have created a handy comparison of them. Note Brightlocal are biased, because they have their own tool.
Also note it is a favourite brag of digital marketing agencies, including us, to post “before and after” grids on social media. But note the size of the grid. Many agencies brag about turning the grid green when the grid is in fact just a few streets wide, whereas we’ve shown improvements over much wider areas.
The alternative to a local search grid is a rank tracker report. In a rank tracker we set up various keywords and one single geographical location (typically by postcode), and the report will show us where we rank at that single location for each keyword, like this:
At first glance, the grid might seem like the ideal way to monitor search rankings. We can see how we’re ranking at various different places and get an easy visual picture, rather than only knowing where we rank for a term at one particular location.
However, there are a few drawbacks to local search grids. The first is that they are expensive. All the providers charge per point on the grid, per search. If you want to run a grid for one or two terms once a week, that’s fine, but if you want to run (as in the above example) 35 search grids every week, that will become expensive.
Which leads us to the next drawback. Interpreting the data for one or two terms on a local search grid is easy enough, but let’s say we have 35 grids to look at. Maybe we are targeting 70 terms, maybe 100. Are we going to look at 100 different search grids, comparing each one with the ones from previous weeks or months? Aside from it being bamboozling, we would be left with no time to do anything else.
And finally, grids only show us results on Google Maps, not organic search results. A rank tracking report will show us results for desktop search, mobile search and Google maps, which is much more insightful.
As always it’s about choosing the right tool for the right job. There’s no right way to set up search monitoring, but typically what we’ll do is set up a rank tracker for all keywords, and local search grids for the 1-5 most important of those keywords. That way we get a broad picture of what’s going on, whilst also monitoring our search reach for the most important terms.
If we’re running a local search grid, we will see rankings over a map area. But if we’re using a rank tracker report, we have to select one particular geographical location we want to run it at. So how do we decide where to set it?
As discussed in the previous guide on understanding search, proximity is a large factor in search results, meaning it’s easier to rank for a term at our clinic location than anywhere else. For this reason, we’ll initially set a rank tracker report to the exact clinic location.
Why? Because we’re typically interested in the change we’re making. So if a clinic isn’t ranking at all for “back pain clinic” and we create targeted back pain content, we want to see if that has caused a change in the Google rankings. The easiest place to see that is at the clinic location.
If the clinic is particularly targeting a certain area – let’s say they’re on the outskirts of town and want to rank in the town centre – then we’ll set up additional rank tracker reports in that location. We don’t want to set up more than 2 or 3 rank tracking locations, so as not to be overwhelmed with information. In most cases we’ll set up just one at the clinic location.
Of course, we also want to see the reach of our SEO, not just results at the clinic location. For this we’ll use a local search grid, but only for our key terms. So in the above example where we have 35 terms to monitor, we will monitor them all with a rank tracker at the clinic location and perhaps additionally in the centre of town, and then set up local search grids for just “dentist” and “dentist near me”. The key is to create reports which give us useful information, without creating so many that the information becomes too much to manage.
If the clinic’s SEO is going well, to the point that results at the clinic location become meaningless because they are doing well across the board, then we might set up rank tracker reports further away – say in surrounding towns – to get deeper information on how well the clinic’s SEO is penetrating these surrounding areas than the local search grid will provide.
So – start with a rank tracker report at your location and a local search grid for 1-3 key terms, then use that information to decide what additional or alternative reports you want to set up.
Towards the end of 2023 it started being reported that Google returns different results depending on whether businesses are open when the search is made. Some SEOs have shown that a client might rank #1 everywhere within a mile of the business when its opening times show it as open, and not feature in search results at all 5 minutes later when its hours show it as closed.
I’ve yet to test this properly for clinics, but on the initial research I’ve done it does seem that Google will return clinics further away from me which are open if my more local clinics are closed.
The takeaway in terms of SEO monitoring is to ensure your ranking reports run whilst your business is marked as open on your Google business profile so as not to get skewed results.
You have your SEO reporting all set up, you’ve taken your baseline measurements and you’re now ready to make some changes and measure the effect they have, thus seeing what works and what doesn’t.
If only it were that simple. You will probably find your SEO results to be stubborn, surprising, chaotic and sometimes apparently random. Google is a capricious beast and tying a particular outcome to a particular action is difficult. Furthermore, a common theme on SEO forums is “why [the hell] is/isn’t this site ranking”. Sometimes it just makes no sense, even to the best.
What we can identify are general trends. If I know that I have done something for 10 clients and 9 of them have seen an uptick in search reach, I can provisionally say that works. If I then go to SEO forums, watch industry leader webinars and so on and they also broadly agree that it has worked for them too, then we can start to say with some surety that doing this is a positive ranking factor for most businesses at this point in time.
SEO is a lot like investing in the stock market. Rankings are going up and down all the time, there are lots of people who claim to be the expert with all the insights, and lots of different conflicting opinions. Like the stock market, a broad consensus among commentators probably means that this insight is correct, and like the stock market you are probably better looking for a holistic, overall improvement over time rather than chasing gains based on rankings from one week to the next.
So, monitor your results, look for improvements and do the things people are agreed on to improve your SEO. Remember that your results may well be volatile and not always make sense, but keep to your strategy and play the long game.
If you have more questions about SEO, we’ll be happy to help. Feel free to reach out, come and ask a question in Free Webinar Friday, or book a free strategy call.
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