Best Practices For Structuring Your Keywords & Tracking Locations for Local Rank Tracking

The Keywords and Tracking Locations fields allow you to custom tailor your rank tracking campaigns to be as specific or broad as you'd like. Depending on the level of detail you require, you can structure your campaigns using these two fields to be either simple or more sophisticated.

Here's is a detailed guide on we recommend using Keywords and Tracking Locations for various business types and ranking goals:

Keywords

The Keywords field is where you enter the search terms that you want to track in ALL locations. Any keywords you enter here will be searched from and tracked in every Tracking Location you set below.

If you’re only planning to track rankings from locations within a single city, then adding geomodified terms here will work fine. 

•  A geomodified term is a keyword with a location modifier, such as “plumbers Chicago”, where chic ago is the location modifier. 
•  A non-geomodified term is just the keyword on its own, such as “plumbers”.

If you plan to track rankings across different cities, then we advise that you add only non-geomodified terms into the Keywords field. You would then add the geomodified terms for each location below in the Tracking Locations field. 

Tracking Locations

Each Tracking Location you add is where we’ll track rankings from. It’s as if someone was standing at that location, running a search on Google, and then telling you where you rank. 

You can check rankings from a city, zip code, or even from specific geo-coordinates.

⭐ It’s important to keep in mind that when you set the location to a city, it is like tracking from the exact pinpoint of the city center (centroid). If your business is on the edge of town, and you’re tracking from the city centroid, then you might not rank in that location.

We always recommend tracking from the zip/postal code that the business is located in, and it’s helpful to add tracking locations from surrounding zip codes as well to see how you rank outside of your area.

Tracking by zip codes is similar to tracking by city in that it will set the tracking location to be the center of that zip code. If your business is on the edge of the defined area for that zip code, you might not rank well at the centroid of the zip code. 

If you want to get really precise with the location you’re tracking from, you can even set the tracking location to be geo-coordinates. The easiest way to get geo-coordinates is to look them up on Google Maps. Go to http://maps.google.com and search for a business or address at the location you want to search from. Then, look at the URL in the search bar for the geo-coordinates. They will look like this: 33.5702419,-84.5404642. Be careful to not paste in any extra characters like the @ symbol when adding these to the Tracking Location field.

Each Tracking Location you add also has its own keywords field. Keywords entered into these fields will only be searched from that location. This allows you to specify keywords that you want to search in some locations but not others. See the examples below for different types of common campaign configurations.

 Example 1 - A Single-Location Brick and Mortar Business 

• Example business: dentist
• Goal: they want to track how they rank in their own neighborhood and surrounding areas
• Keywords Field:
  • dentist, dentists, dentists chicago, chicago dentists, teeth whitening
  • (Keywords in this field will be tracked from all tracking locations)

Tracking Locations:

1. Add a tracking location for the business’ zip/postal code. 

• For example: Chicago, IL 60603

2. Add a tracking location for some of the surrounding zip/postal codes (You can look up zip codes by using this tool with a 1 mile radius, or by using zipmap.net)

• For example: 60602, 60604, 60601, 60606

Note: No need to add location specific keywords to any Tracking Location for this campaign since we’re only tracking in one city. 

Example 2 - A Single-Location Service Area Business

• Example business: plumber
• Goal: they are located in Aurora, which is a suburb of Chicago. They want to track how they rank in Aurora, Chicago, and two other suburbs they service: Naperville and Elgin.
• Keywords Field:
  • plumber, plumbers, drain cleaning, etc
  • (Keywords in this field will be tracked from all tracking locations)

Tracking Locations

1. Add a tracking location for the business’ zip/postal code in Aurora 

• For example: Aurora, IL 60505 
• Add location specific keyword
  • For example: plumbers aurora, aurora plumbers

 2. Add a track location at the Aurora centroid

• For example: Aurora, IL
• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: plumbers aurora, aurora plumbers

 3. Add tracking locations for some of the primary zip codes they service in Chicago

    (You can look up zip codes by using this tool with a 1 mile radius, or by using zipmap.net)

• For example: 60605, 60608, 60621
• Add location specific keywords.
  • For example: plumbers chicago, drain cleaning chicago

 4. Add a tracking location for Naperville at the centroid 

• For example: Naperville, IL
• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: plumbers naperville

 5. Add a tracking location for Elgin at the centroid

• For example: Elgin, IL
• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: plumber elgin

Note 1: This case illustrates how and why we use the location specific keyword fields. We don’t want to add “plumbers elgin” to the main keywords field at the top, because then it will be searched in every Tracking Location we are tracking from. For example, we don’t need to track “plumbers elgin” from Naperville, we only want to track it from Elgin.

Note 2: This is just one example of many possible tracking configurations for this business. You could choose to track from zip codes in each suburb, and you could choose to also track from just the Chicago city centroid, rather than the zip codes used in the example.

Example 3 - A Multi-location Business

• Example business: Lawyer with 3 locations in 3 different cities: Denver CO, Boulder CO, and Fort Collins, CO.
• Goal: They want to track how each location ranks at the city centroid and at zip codes around each location.
• Keywords Field:
  • personal injury lawyer, car accident lawyer, injury lawyer 
  • (Keywords in this field will be tracked from all tracking locations)

Tracking Locations:

1. Add a tracking location at the Denver centroid: Denver, CO

• Add location keywords
  • For Example: personal injury lawyer denver, car accident lawyer denver, injury lawyer denver

 2. Add a tracking location for the business’ zip/postal code in Denver: Denver, CO 80218

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: personal injury lawyer denver, car accident lawyer denver, injury lawyer denver

 3. Add tracking locations for zip codes around their location in Denver: 80202, 80206, 80209, 80205
(You can look up zip codes by using this tool with a 1 mile radius, or by using zipmap.net)

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: personal injury lawyer denver, car accident lawyer denver, injury lawyer denver

4. Add a tracking location at the Boulder centroid: Boulder, CO

• Add location specific keywords
• For example: personal injury lawyer boulder, car accident lawyer boulder, injury lawyer boulder
  

5. Add a tracking location for the business’ zip/postal code in Boulder: Boulder, CO 80304

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: personal injury lawyer boulder, car accident lawyer boulder, injury lawyer boulder

6. Add tracking locations for zip codes around their location in Boulder: 80301, 80303, 80516, 80026
(You can look up zip codes by using this tool with a 1 mile radius, or by using zipmap.net)

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: personal injury lawyer boulder, car accident lawyer boulder, injury lawyer boulder

7. Add a tracking location at the Fort Collins centroid: Fort Collins, CO

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example personal injury lawyer fort collins, car accident lawyer fort collins, injury lawyer fort collins

8. Add a tracking location for the business’ zip/postal code in Fort Collins: Fort Collins, CO 80525

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: personal injury lawyer fort collins, car accident lawyer fort collins, injury lawyer fort collins

9. Add tracking locations for zip codes around their location in Fort Collins: 80526, 80528, 80524, 80521
(You can look up zip codes by using this tool with a 1 mile radius, or by using zipmap.net)

• Add location specific keywords
  • For example: personal injury lawyer fort collins, car accident lawyer fort collins, injury lawyer fort collins

Example 4 - A Multi-location Hotel Chain

• Example business: Multi-location Hotel Chain
• Goal: In this case the hotel isn’t necessarily interested in how they rank in their own city. They are interested in seeing how they rank when people are searching for hotels from other cities/countries. Let’s assume they have 3 hotels. One in Miami, FL, USA; one in Toronto, On, Canada; and one in Kingston, Jamaica.
• Keywords Field: hotels in miami fl, hotels in toronto canada, hotels in kingston jamaica
  • (Keywords in this field will be tracked from all tracking locations)

Tracking Locations:
Obviously, there are too many different potential locations to track from, so we want to just get a general representative sample of how rankings look when searched from different countries or different parts of the country. The hotel may want to look at where they tend to attract most of their customers. 

*For all of the following tracking locations, there will be no location specific keywords.

1. Add a tracking location from Seattle, WA (Northeast USA)   

2. Add a tracking location from New York, NY (Northwest USA)   

3. Add a tracking location from Los Angeles, CA (Southwest USA) 

4. Add a tracking location from Miami, FL (Southeast USA)    

5. Add a tracking location from Wichita, KS (Central USA)  

6. Add a tracking location from London, England

7. Add a tracking location from Barcelona, Spain 

8. Add a tracking location from Capetown, South Africa 

9. Add a tracking location from Vancouver, BC, Canada 

10. Add a tracking location from Toronto, ON, Canada 

11. Add a tracking location from Sydney, Australia

12. Add a tracking location from Tokyo, Japan

13. Etc...