As someone who’s attempted to follow the performance of your own site, you likely realize that the results of a Google search can fluctuate from moment to moment. What you appear to see on your screen in front of you in New York can look radically different from a customer in Los Angeles.
As online marketers, this unstable environment makes it tricky for us to attempt to keep track. For anyone focused on online advertising in West Palm Beach, for example, perhaps the most frequently asked question presented to our team is if a tool such as Ahrefs can return search rankings with a location in mind. The answer is yes, but this is a function that deserves further explanation if you hope to become an expert in local SEO.
The Importance of Local SEO
Local SEO is a way of optimizing your online presence in order to attract more business for local searches. For all local businesses or service providers operating in a particular locality, being part of these localized search engine results can make all the difference. When people search for “Best pizza near me” or “plumber in Chicago,” search engines based on where these people are located show them search results based on relevance. If you are not doing local SEO, you are basically operating in the dark. You can be ranking very high in search engines but not showing up in your customers’ neighborhoods.
Ahrefs Geo Features Overview
Ahrefs is considered a powerhouse in this space, and happily, it provides location-level tracking capabilities. With Ahrefs’s Rank Tracker tool, you can state exactly where you want to track your keywords. Of course, this information can be pinpointed not only at a country level but right down to a state level, city level, and even a zip code level. This gives toolsets the capability to model exactly how a particular individual would search in your marketplace, right in your market.
The simple selection of your targeted location when setting up a project in Ahrefs will allow you to see statistics based on your local search environment and not a country average. For those wondering, does Ahrefs pull rankings with a location? Absolutely – it is designed to meet this local need.
Ahrefs Tools to Optimize Local SEO
To gain the most benefit with this tool, please organize different projects or tags for different regions if you have multiple regions you serve. To better compare your performance in different regions without clouding your information, you can isolate your regions. A good technique also would be to take advantage of your “SERP overview,” which is available through your tool Keywords Explorer.
With this function, you can observe how your search engine results page will look in other countries, which will show you your competition not just in your region but in other countries as well. By specifically monitoring SERP rankings Ahrefs provides, you gain a comprehensive view of your competitive landscape on a local scale. Additionally, please take note of your “Local Pack” features because Ahrefs notes if your page is indexed in these highly sought-after positions.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
One common mistake we notice is being overly reliant on national-level data for your local business. Failing to account for a local geography in your customer demographics can result in poor decision-making and budgeting. Secondly, failing to update your location settings when your business grows can end up being a poor idea. When you open a new local business in another city, you need to incorporate that location into your tracker right away.
Lastly, do not forget to keep in mind that although tools are excellent, they are not foolproof in being able to capture all the elements of a personalized search history by a user, therefore requiring you to take it more as a good indicator but not an accurate fact.
Mastering Your Local Strategy
To completely dominate an industry, you have to first master your local competition. With the help of advanced location features available in Ahrefs, among other SEO tools, you can see where you really stand. The role of technology in marketing is to provide information, but it is left to us to make sense of it all and make sure local customers can find us when they need to, and Trigger Digital is experienced in helping businesses of all shapes and sizes!