Best way to measure local search keyword rank
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I have several clients that have a regional or local presence and want to track their rankings for various keywords, but only in the areas they are located in. What are the best ways to track keyword rank in specific locations or regions of the US?
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Hey there! I know it's an older thread, but wanted to let you know we're now able to track local rankings. We wrote a blog post about it at http://moz.com/blog/local-rankings-in-moz-analytics.
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The question is specifically about rank tracking by region—not traffic by region.
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You can use filters in Google Analytics to only show traffic broken down by keyword in specific Cities, States, Metros, Continents, etc.
Use this symbol - | - to insert multiple criteria into the same filter (for example, if you wanted to group a bunch of cities - "Chicago|New York|San Francisco|Anchorage."
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You would have to use some kind of rank tracking software independent of Moz. Maybe as a feature add-on with Moz analytics they will eventually roll out that functionality (fingers crossed).
It seems like it's in poor taste to recommend competitors here... but nonetheless, Whitespark has a local rank tracker (though there is a wait list for sign ups) and Advanced Web Ranking allows you to specify rank by location. The drawback of AWR is that you'd have to configure a ton of stuff on your own and run the rank checks on your own (which means you're going to need at a bare minimum at least 5-10 proxies). That usually spooks most people off.
Last, you could actually get a very real picture by extracting the CD parameter using filters in analytics and then throw in Region or City as a secondary dimension. That wouldn't give you your average regional rank for particular keywords, though. It would give you the ranking on clickthrough from the SERPs.
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