Do any Local Rank Trackers Report This Way?
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I'm having trouble finding a local rank tracking service with useful reporting. I've tried several and for the money, have gravitated toward's Whitespark's service as for $25/month I can track unlimited locations. But their report is indicative of what I've seen time and time again in my 18-year experience as a Software Developer and Internet Marketer. Whomever is making the design decisions isn't a Seasoned (Local) SEO, and/or probably hasn't done their homework well enough by talking to seasoned SEOs.
Their Summary Report looks like this (see attachement).
When I'm doing Local SEO I'm looking at a lot of reporting data but among that, probably the most important is:
How many of the listings moved up into position #1-3 on Local Finder which is also usually the Local 3-Pack (sometimes a 2-pack explaining the discrepancy in the first two rows between the number in the #1-3 column.)
I also want to know how many listing moved UP into the #4-10. And vice versa, what fell out of #1-3 and #4-10.
The problem with the format of this report, if a listing falls from #2 to #5, it will be a decrease in #1-3 and an INCREASE for #4-10. This would give me the false impression that a listing that was below #10 came into the #4-10 when in actuality the increase in #4-10 was because of a decrease in #1-3!! One situation is positive the other is negative.
What I want to know is how many listings (totals without getting out the calculator):
- moved up into #1-3 (White Spark does this via the Increase column in the Local 3-Pack row)
- moved up into #4-10
- moved down out of #1-3 to #4-10
- moved down out of #1-3 to below #10
- moved down out of #4-10 to below #10.
Does anyone know of local tracking services that give you this kind of data in this way?
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Hey there. I'm Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark. I do most of the planning and design of features for our software. I think I'm a decently seasoned local SEO, but I'm embarrassed to say that I hadn't considered what you are saying in this post. You're absolutely right that we should report ranking movements in the way you propose, and I will get my dev team working on it right away. We'll have this change implemented within the next couple of weeks. Thank you for the excellent suggestion! You can contact me anytime at darren@whitespark.ca if you have any other thoughts, questions, or suggestions.
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