Serps results of clients in other cities

I wouldn't worry so much about the local, unless all the business comes from local. Google regional won't help you if you want results by city. Why not include the city name in your searches? Not a perfect solution but beats finding someone in those cities to do you keyword searches for you or finding proxies in those cities. Now that would be a challenge and probably expensive.

FYI, if you are looking for a fast and free solution with all the google regions, have you checked out the SERP checker in my signature?

FYI, if you get the local private proxies, we'd gladly feed them into our SERP checker to give you the local results.

Hey Aygabtu thanks for your reply, but Im not sure you undertood me. I am building business websites for small local offline businesses.

So perhaps my client is a plumber in Miami, he will likely want me to rank him for
Miami plumber or install water main Miami...things like that.

When I have a conversation with a new client like this, it is nice to log onto google simultaneously with the client and do a little quick comp analysis in order to suggest
some target keywords, a possible domain preference and potential costs and time to achieve rankings.

Now my small business websites and this research Im talking about is for organic results in local searches.

Now if he sees a 7pack and 3 organic results in Miami.....I will likely only see 10 organic results and what I see may be in a very different order and possibly different sites than he sees.

In fact I will need to know where his site, once built and ranking, ranks in his area for his target terms, as this will be very different from his area to my area.

I hope all my local seo website designers that do offline sites for clients in other cities will jump in and save the day

Ohhhh. I misunderstood that part. But yes, keeping on hand a proxy to everywhere would be too costly. Hidemya**.com ....comes close, I had just figured some developer would have a software that works like this by now.

I am starting to wonder how the other seo guys are selling their services to people in other areas. I mean do they call the client and say "tell me where u r ranked today" oh and "don't count the "little listings at the top" those are local circle places maps pages. hehe

Sounds like Id be talking in a foreign language to a client and my end result would appear unprofessional.

Im doing luke warm cold calls and need to get the potential client at their computer....make them do a search simultaneously and we see the same thing without them having to share their screen with me

Dennis

I am starting to guess the results will be extremely similar...just minus the 7pack or whatever google profile pages are displayed.

Guess if someone could confirm that, my confidence would be a bit better.

D

I recommend using Google's Ad Preview Tool (I can't add links but just Google "ad preview tool") which allows you to select your search location and thus theoretically shows local search results. As long as you continue to use the Ad Preview Tool (with the same settings each time) you can reliably track changes in Google rankings for target keywords.

Keep in mind that you'll never be able to truly match the SERPs seen by people physically located in a given local area. There are, so I'm told, 70+ factors used to personalize Google rankings even when you're not signed in to a Google account... so the best you can do is try to show your clients that their overall average ranking in the SERPs is improving across a variety of target keywords.

@ mbelmont ----it works perfectly thanks a million!!!! AWESOME!!!!!
Just what I needed

@ aygabtu ....really appreciate your assistance as well - Im gonna check out your tool tomorrow also.

D

Another thing to keep in mind, Dennis.... at the end of the day, your clients care more about traffic and sales leads than they do about the actual search rankings.

In other words, if you can prove to your clients that they're getting more website traffic (from Google and other SERPs) and more sales leads, you probably don't have to worry too much about proving that you're improving their search rankings.

Also, many local SEOs focus so much on rankings and then they fail to work on improving CTR of their organic rankings..... acquiring a top-3 ranking in the SERPs is only useful if people actually click on your listing and visit the website.

Anyway, my point is just that your clients are hiring you so that they will get more website traffic and, as a result, more customers. The actual organic search rankings are just one factor involved in that.

I agree with you 100%. Truth be told the primary initial focus is selling the website so it was important to see the competing websites to make sure I sell the client a site that is capable of competing with existing competition. Im goint after a local trade niche that I have 20 years experience in, so I have a good edge on selling them their site. The upsell is the seo; hehe

Since these are brand new businesses perhaps I should set up the sites with a tracking phone number so they dont blame me if they have poor conversions. Just a thought.

D

Mark,
any suggestion for a way to track a number. anything newer or cheaper than say a kall8 number nowadays. any idea if a google voice number can be placed on the site, tracked and forwarded to the client?

thx

Another manual method you might try is creating an account on city data and asking someone in a particular city to search the particular keyword you are looking for results from.

Ive used city data in the past, yes lots of helpful people there. But for these cases I was really trying to see things in real time on demand. The google preview tool definately appears to be one excellent solution.

Thanks
Brainfreeze0

If you are using Google Analytic of StatCounter then you can check visitor stats, for which keywords they visited your site, what was the position of your keywords, and from which country, city, location they visited..

Beats me, I have one site where every rank tracker I use shows a MASSIVELY different SERP - tried different proxies (there's Proxfree too, which has a lot of different IPs) and just can't get a consistent result, so am just not worrying about ranking anymore for that site . Not a solution that will really help you, sorry...

In Google, or any other search engine I know of, you can change your location. In Google it is down the left hand side of the screen.

If you use SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker, it has this feature built in for Google.

If you want to see Google results for San Diego, CA and you are in Tampa, Fl, you can select it in Rank Tracker.

Sometimes you are going to connect to different data centers no matter what you do and see slightly different results.

I use seomoz, it's pretty reliable but also pretty expensive as in $100/month

@ MikeFriedman.....yes I tried that but the "packs" are omitted from the results...even though my focus is the organic, it made me wonder how much else is missing in comparison. It would also be good info for me to notice that the client I am selling a website to, is lacking a local profile, has one unclaimed or has one that also needs work.

Gonna also check out the options in ranktracker, but if it is not a preset setting, not sure how I would tell it to go check the results in san diego. I think they do have the option to check the rankings in the "local packs" but not sure how that changed with the newest local shakeup and elimination of "places"

@ Nik0 what are the main features available for a business in seomoz? rank tracking? got to take a relook at it.