Here's a cool tool for businesses to track their local search engine ranking. The Local Search Rank Checker is developed by BrightLocal.com. Using this web-based tool, you can check and track your local search engines ranking, for instance, on Google Places or Yahoo! Local and also your main, organic rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Here's a brief review of the features offered by the tool and how to use them:
1 – Providing the details of your search
Here, you fill in the fields in the boxes provided, for instance, Search terms, Website Address, Your Business Name(s) and so on. After filling in the boxes with appropriate inputs, select your preferred settings and click ‘Get Rankings’.
*For a lot of search terms, you can cut and paste them into the “Search Term” and save time.
2 – View the report of your ranking
Your ranking report will be returned, displayed in a full table of results including your current position and last position in each search engine and the type of result result (organic, paid etc.,). The number of search terms you enter will affect the time the tool takes in generating the report.
You can also download your Ranking Report as a CSV or PDF file.
3 – Save reports to your BrightLocal account
The reports generated by tool can be saved to your BrightLocal account, then you can tag them to your clients and branch locations etc. The tool also lets you schedule each report to update weekly or monthly, or you can just leave them as ‘ad-hoc’ reports that can be updated whenever you want to.
You can also receive reports by email. By choosing the 'Yes' option for the 'Send schedule reports by email' (as shown in the image below) you can use 5 email addresses to receive the reports, or be sent to colleagues and clients directly.
4 – View and access your saved reports
In the Reports Table, you can view all your saved reports, re-run reports and click to view the most recent reports as CSV or PDF files. On the same table, you can also access all your previous reports by clicking the 'Report History' right next to the 'Re-run Report' button. This way, you never lose your previous ranking data.
5 – Customize reports
This tool also allows you to customize reports by creating ‘Branding Profiles’. You can also upload your logo, change the font colors and add your own text or links to the report header and footer. After making your preferred changes, you can save your branding profile and use it later to customize each report that you create.
The tool crawls through the top 50 results on all search engines and local search engines. It also crawls local directories apart from the specified search engines while you generate your ranking report. To further simplify the process of running new reports, the company also says that they will be adding an option to upload CSV in a later release. You can register to start using the tool or test it out for 5 times free of cost.
