Read the rank grid

Where the grid lives

Open SEO from the sidebar, pick one location, and stay on the Overview tab. The grid is the Grid Rank Report card.

This example is a downtown hotel searching on hotel downtown houston, and it's the shape you're hoping to see: first place in the blocks around the property, slipping to fourth, fifth and sixth a little further out, into the teens after that, and out of the top 20 entirely at the edges of the grid.

Two controls are worth finding before anything else, and both are boxed: the view switch beside the card heading, and the colour legend under the map.

One point, one search, one position

Each square is a real search Synup ran from that coordinate. The colour is your position in the local results:

The last two rows are the ones people misread. 20⁺ is a result: Synup searched, you weren't there. N/A is an absence of a result, and it is left out of Top 3 %, Top 10 % and Avg Rank entirely, so a partly-measured grid never reports a coverage it doesn't have.

The next screenshot is a different business — a small bed and breakfast in Fairbanks, Alaska — because the Houston grid above can't show you this. Houston measured all 49 of its points, so it has no grey squares at all.

The two boxed squares are the whole distinction. The red one was measured and the business wasn't in the top 20. The grey one returned nothing. Only the red one reaches the numbers in the corner of the map.

Points that fall on water are a third case. Synup measures them like any other but doesn't draw them and doesn't count them, because a rank square in the middle of a river reads as a bug rather than a result. That is why this Fairbanks grid draws 45 squares rather than 49 — four of its points landed on the river.

The Water points checkbox appears above the map only when the grid actually has some, which is why you can see it on this Fairbanks example and not on the Houston one. It is also not a view toggle: ticking it saves a setting on the location, so the map and the Top 3 %, Top 10 % and Avg Rank figures all change, for everyone who opens the page afterwards.

Three ways to look at the same data

The buttons above the map are Grid Points, Both and Heatmap.

• Grid Points

  Shows

  One coloured square per measured coordinate

  Use it when

  You want to read individual positions and click into a specific point

• Heatmap

  Shows

  The same ranks as a smooth gradient of strength

  Use it when

  You want to see the shape of your coverage — where it falls away, and in which direction

• Both

  Shows

  The gradient with the squares drawn over it

  Use it when

  You want the overall shape and the exact numbers at once

Heatmap is the one that's hard to picture from a description. This is the Houston hotel again, the same report as the first screenshot: the green band is where it takes first place, gold is the blocks just south of that, and everything red is outside the top 20. Read this way you stop counting individual numbers and start seeing the shape — a strong core that falls away fast in every direction.

Show Competition adds pins for the businesses holding positions in your grid, each labelled with its best rank. It works on a single keyword, not the aggregated view — pick a keyword first, or the map just tells you to.

One keyword, or all of them

Select Keyword on the left lists your tracked keywords with their averages, plus Aggregated Grid Report at the top.

The aggregated view takes the best rank found at each point across every keyword, so it answers "how visible am I here at all". A single keyword answers "how visible am I here for this search". Diagnose with a single keyword; report progress with the aggregate.

With only one keyword tracked, the aggregated view and that keyword's own grid are the same picture.

Clicking a point on a single keyword's grid hands that coordinate to Sydekick, already scoped to the right client and location. You get the businesses that actually returned there with their ratings and review counts, a plain statement of whether you were among them, a short read of why, and a couple of suggested next actions. The aggregated view deliberately withholds that hand-off, because a cell that came from "whichever keyword did best here" has no single keyword to reason about.

Next

• Read Ranking Analytics
• Compare local competitors