Local rank tracking: why two reports disagree, and how to compare them
Niladri Sarkar, CMO, Synup

Hello, I'm Niladri from Synup. We build local SEO software for agencies and brands. What exactly is local rank tracking and why is it important? Imagine this, when somebody searches for, say, a plumber or a dentist near me, Google shows a short list of nearby businesses on the map. Now, where the business shows up on the map and that list depends a lot on where the searcher actually is located. So, a business can show up first on one street, and if you do the same search maybe a mile or a couple of miles away, they might be missing altogether.

Local rank tracking measures this. A tracker runs the same search for a setup pins across a map. Each pin denotes a certain location or a coordinate on the map. Then it records where the business shows up at each pin, then gives you a picture of visibility across the whole area a business serves and not just one spot. Agencies use these reports to show their clients where they are visible, whether the work is paying off. And for larger brands, multi-location brands, businesses, basically try to track if your work is paying off. That's also why it hurts when two different reports on two different tools or the same tool disagrees. And that's exactly what I'm going to touch upon in this video.

So these are two different reports for the same business, same keyword, searched on the same day. Report A says that our average rank is 11, and report B says three and a half. So which one is right? And trust me, this comes up all the time in agency business.

The easy move in such cases is just pick the better number and report it. Or another way out would be to decide that one of the tools that you're using the report is from is broken. We'll ask one question the whole way through. Did the rankings change or did the measurement criteria change? Everything here is made up. We are not comparing vendors.

Our sample business is, I just made up a name, Juniper Bench Plumbing. Each pin is a spot on the map where the search was run. The number on the pin is where the business showed up from the spot. A rank or the number that you get in your rank tracking tool isn't a fixed fact about your business. Your business is not going to rank there forever. What you see in any rank tracking report is just a snapshot. And it depends on a number of factors. What listing was checked, which keyword was searched, where the search ran from, which devices were used. Was it a desktop or a tablet or a mobile device? And the time when it ran. You change any of these factors, and you're looking at a completely different measurement. For example, the keyword. A keyword plumber versus plumber near me, and emergency plumber, say San Diego, are completely different searches.

There's something called a radius trap. Here's why pin locations matter so much. In a report A, as you see it on the 5x5 grid, the pins are one mile apart. There's five per side. So the edge pins north, south, east and west are two miles apart from the center. But the corner pin is two miles north and two miles east at the same time. That puts it about 2.8 miles out.

So what's the radius of this grid? Two miles or 2.8? Tools answer that differently. Two different reports. Both can say two miles radius and still search from different spots. So same business, smaller grid, and you get a better number. Look at report B. It covers only the center nine pins. Same spacing, smaller area.

B summary looks much better. Report A says the business is in the top three about one time in five, one out of five times, and B says more than half the time. So count the top three pins is the same five in both. B, the second report didn't find any strong spots. It just left out the weak ones near the edge. So no ranking improved. We only changed which pins we counted. Remember, the top three share on both the reports, pins on the map, it's not a share of customers call or traffic. The fix is simple. Compare only the pins that both reports share or both reports have in common. If you are using Synup, when you are setting up your keywords itself, we give you an option to set the distance of each pin. So by default, I prefer setting them at one mile apart from each other. More pins are not necessarily proof of the business covering more area or doing better. A denser grid shows more detail, and it doesn't mean the business got more visible.

Now, let's talk about the blank pins. The business showed up, you get a rank. It's very simple. But what's not simple is if the search worked, but the business wasn't in the results. Or the search failed or timed out, and there was no data. So two different outcomes can be reported as the same blank. If you face such a scenario, don't copy your last month's data into the latest month reported back to the client. Tell the client exactly what it is, what you don't know. The real picture will be a little better or a little worse than what the report suggests. So before you trust the average provided in every report, find out how many pins actually reported back.

Okay, one more scenario. Both reports now cover the full grid. Everything we checked lines up as per our checklist. But at the center pin, A says 1 and B says 2. So why do they differ? Very tiny moves in location or changes in location. Google weighs distance heavily in local results. So even if the search was done from a few blocks away and the results can change drastically. Report A might center its grid in the core area of the downtown. Tracker B might center on the business pin a few blocks off. Third-party data providers. A lot of vendors use third-party data providers, do not have the search infra themselves, due to which they buy SERP data from these providers. So if two tools are using different providers with the different methods behind them, then the results can also be different. Pins are collected one after the other. Two tools can hit the same pin minutes or hours apart, and that produces completely different results. Keep both the results. I don't average them and don't pick the one that I personally like. Check the basics, same listing, same time, errors, etc. And I run it again. Okay. Neither results are the absolute truth. So you're just trying to see how much of the results bounced around. And when do you actually call it inconclusive? Sometimes you cannot explain the difference. Okay. I've been in search for 20 years. There are times it beats me. Tell the client what you saw. And what you couldn't confirm. Just don't blame the algorithm or an update to credit your own SEO work. You're going to lose the trust.

Now, tracking itself, as I was mentioning earlier over the past few weeks and months, tracking is actually getting harder. Google itself is making it harder for tools to collect ranking data and SERP data in general. So in September 2025, I think, it dropped the setting that lets tools pull 100 results in one request. Then this fall, I think, trackers reported something worse. Some results pages that look normal, but the listings on them are completely wrong. The industry calls these as poisoned SERPs. One enterprise tracker apparently studied like 27 million results pages and 8% was swapped for mid-September. At the end of the month, it peaked about 25%. Then other trackers have reported lower rates. Bing isn't easy either. Microsoft shut down its public Bing search API in August 2025, if I'm correct. Tools that used them had to find another way in. Search Console data comes from real searches by real people, does not include ad clicks.

Google reports the top position on your site held by each query averaged across several search when it showed. Nobody's scraping, so there's nothing to poison your results. Google Search Console as a tool isn't perfect. No tool is. It covers your website in Google Search, not the map grid, and it blends every location and device. So it won't tell you how you rank two miles north of the office, but it gives you a direction.

So here's a checklist I'll run before two reports go in front of a client. Make sure it's the same keyword and the same listing. It's on the same search surface and setup. One mile pin difference versus two mile pin difference can be huge. Collection time recorded, not the time when you export the report, but when the report actually ran and collected the information. Then the verdict, one of the three, the difference is explained, or if it's inconclusive, mention it. So here's how to explain the first example to a client. These two reports looked at different areas where they overlap. Your rankings are kind of exactly the same. The second report looks better only because it covers a smaller area. So one habit that makes all of this easier, Decide the question you're answering. Save the pins and the rules. Use them next time. If you change the setup, then call it a new baseline. Don't join it with an older trend and call it a report. So next time two local ranking reports don't match, ask the same set of questions. Did the ranking change or did the measurement criteria change? Until next time, have a nice day.