Google is all about serving up results based on your precise location[1], which means there’s no such thing as a “national” SERP anymore. So, if you wanted to get an accurate representation of how you’re performing nationally, you’d have to track every single street corner across the country.
Not only is this not feasible, it’s also a headache — and the kind of nightmare that keeps your accounting team up at night. Because we’re in the business of making things easy, we devised a happier (and cost-efficient) alternative.
Follow along and learn how to set up a statistically robust national tracking strategy in STAT[2], no matter your business or budget. And while we’re at it, we’ll also show you how to calculate your national ranking average.
Let’s pretend we’re a large athletic retailer. We have 30 stores across the US, a healthy online presence, and the powers-that-be have approved extra SEO spend — money for 20,000 additional keywords is burning a hole in our pocket. Ready to get started?
Step 1: Pick the cities that matter most to your business
Google cares a lot about location and so should you. Tracking a country-level SERP isn’t going to cut it anymore — you need to be hyper-local if you want to nab results.
The first step to getting more granular is deciding which cities you want to track in — and there are lots of ways to do this: The top performers? Ones that could use a boost? Best and worst of the cyber world as well as the physical world?
When it comes time for you to choose, nobody knows your business, your data, or your strategy better than you do — ain’t nothing to it but to