City Rank Tracking: Why Your London Ranking Isn’t Your Manchester Ranking

City rank tracking answers a question a national rank check can’t: where do you rank for the people who could actually become your customers? If you run a physiotherapy clinic in Manchester, your position for “physiotherapist” as seen from London tells you very little, and a single national figure doesn’t tell you much more. A city rank checker that queries from inside each city shows you the local number.

Google says as much in its own help pages: your location helps it show nearby results, even when you don’t type a place into the search. So a keyword with local intent is, in effect, a different search in every city.

This article explains why results change from city to city, how a city is checked in a Rank Check Report, what two cities add to the price, and which keywords deserve a city check at all.

Why Google ranks you differently in each city

Google’s guide to how Search works says relevance is decided by hundreds of factors, including the user’s location, language and device. Its own example: a search for “bicycle repair shops” shows different results to someone in Paris than to someone in Hong Kong. The same guide notes that the search features on the results page change with the query too.

Google’s Search Help page on how your location is used when you search is more direct: your location helps show you nearby results, even if you didn’t include a location in your search. Google works that location out from several sources, including the device’s location and the IP address.

For a business, that means three things:

• A keyword with local intent (“dentist”, “emergency electrician”, “wedding venue”) returns a different set of businesses in each city.
• Your organic position can change between cities even when your own pages haven’t changed, because the competing pages have.
• The search you run from your office reflects your city, your device and your history. It is not what a customer in another city sees. Our article on personalised search results explains why your own screen is a poor judge.

The local pack, distance and why your branch matters

On many local searches, a local pack (a map with a short list of businesses) sits above the organic results. Google’s Business Profile Help explains how local ranking works: local results are mainly based on three factors. Its summary sentence calls them relevance, distance and popularity, and the section that explains the third is headed “prominence”.

• Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for.
• Distance is how far each business is from the person searching. If they don’t share where they are, Google uses what it knows about their location.
• Prominence is how well-known a business is.

Distance is the factor that changes with the city. A branch in Manchester is close to a Manchester searcher and far from a London one, whatever its reviews say.

This article is about the organic positions underneath, which is what a rank check reports. The local pack still matters when you read them: when it sits at the top of the page, organic position 1 appears lower on the screen. Every row of a Rank Check Report lists the SERP features on that results page, local pack included, so you can see where it appears and where it doesn’t.

A national ranking is a useful number, but nobody searches from the middle of the country.

How city rank tracking works in a Rank Check Report

In our pay-per-check Google rank reports, a city is added to an order as an extra engine. On the order form you pick the city and the national edition it belongs to, for example Manchester on google.co.uk. City rows are then checked from a point inside that city, not from a national average. Desktop and mobile are included for every engine you add.

The report groups its keyword table by engine and location, so the city rows sit in their own group next to the national ones. Each row shows the position, the change against your previous check, the best position so far, the trend, the ranking URL and the SERP features on that page.

Extra engines are priced per engine, per check, by the size of your list:

The four engines in the base price stay the same: your chosen Google edition on desktop and mobile, plus google.com on desktop and mobile. A city comes on top of those.

A worked example: one order, two cities

Take a heating engineer with branches in London and Manchester and a list of 150 keywords. Pricing is by tier, so 150 keywords are priced as 200.

• Base check, 200 keywords, top 30: $24.99, including google.co.uk and google.com, each on desktop and mobile.
• London as an extra engine: $5.99.
• Manchester as an extra engine: $5.99.
• Total per check: $36.97, before any VAT.

Run monthly for a year, that is 12 × $36.97 = $443.64. Run quarterly, 4 × $36.97 = $147.88.

The same two cities on every tier:

Keep the national rows next to the city rows when you read the result. When a keyword ranks well nationally but poorly in one city, or the other way round, local competition is the likely reason, and the ranking URL usually shows which of your pages Google picked for that city.

Which keywords deserve a city check

A city check costs a little per engine, and every keyword in an order is checked on every engine in it, so add a city when enough of your list depends on location. The test for each keyword: would a customer in the next city want a different result for this search? If yes, it needs a city check.

Start with the cities where you have premises or serve customers, ideally one city for each location page you have. Add a city where you plan to expand only if you’ll act on what the check shows.

How to read city rows

1. Compare each city row with the national row for the same keyword. A big gap means location is doing much of the ranking.
2. Read the ranking URL. If your London page ranks in Manchester, or your home page ranks where a location page should, your location pages may not be distinct enough.
3. Check the SERP features column for a local pack. A position 3 under a local pack sits much further down the screen than a position 3 without one.
4. Keep the same cities on every check. The report compares each keyword row with its own previous check, so a city you add later starts without history.

If you’d rather have someone read the city rows and turn them into actions every month, that is what our SEO rank tracking service does. If you only need the numbers, you can add a city to a one-off Google rank check for $2.99 to $19.99 per engine, depending on your tier and depth.

FAQ

What is city rank tracking?

It means checking where your website ranks in Google as seen from a specific city rather than for the country as a whole. Because Google uses location to show nearby results, the same keyword can rank differently in each city. A city check shows the results page a searcher in that city sees.

Why is my ranking different in another city?

Google uses the searcher’s location to choose relevant results, and for local searches distance to the business is one of the main factors. The competing pages also differ from city to city. Your own pages haven’t changed; the results around them have.

Can I check rankings in a city without a VPN?

Yes. In a Rank Check Report, city rows are checked from a point inside that city, so you don’t depend on a VPN or a browser setting. Our guide to checking Google rankings in another country compares the other ways of doing it.

Does a city check include map pack rankings?

The position in the report is your organic position in Google web search. The SERP features column shows whether a local pack appeared on that results page, but the report doesn’t give your Business Profile’s place inside the map.

How many cities should I track?

One for each location you serve customers from, plus any city you target with its own page. Each city is one extra engine per check, so three cities on a 100-keyword, top 30 order add 3 × $2.99 = $8.97.