Tracking physical points of sale

Setting up your localised ranking

localisation

When we talk about the issue of localised tracking, what exactly are we referring to? We want to know the ranking of our physical points of sale in search engines for a given location (a particular city) and terminal, SERP results being personalised based on those two factors.

To explain this, we will use concrete examples that illustrate how Myposeo clients have made use of our tools.

Maisons du Monde, for example, wanted to know how they were ranked in searches for “furniture store”. La Halle wanted to know the same for “shoe store”, and Total for “petrol stations” or “filling stations”.

These clients wanted to know how the “store locator” part of their site, listing different locations, appeared on Google.

seo vs google maps

When we talk about the issue of localised tracking, what exactly are we referring to?

The following example is based on three searches: furniture store, shoe store and petrol station. All searches were localised to Levallois-Perret. You can see that the majority of the results are from AdWords and Maps, or Maps and a few SEO results. The websites that show up in the organic search results are very generic (PagesJaunes and Mappy). If you want to rank well in natural referencing, it is important to make use of new Google tools such as Maps, images and videos.

If you wish to rank well using generic, non-brand keywords, you must aim to be among the first three Google Maps results or the rare visible organic search results. SEO visibility is not synonymous, for these competing demands, with visibility on Google.

Setting up SEO tracking

You may be asking yourself how Myposeo can help you track all this data in a precise way that takes specific localisations into account.

The first step is to set up your project in the SEO tracking tool.

setup rank tracking

In order to do that, you must understand the “universal search” (or U.S.) offered by the tool. These are results such as news, images, videos, addresses and occasionally carousel ads on mobile platforms. They also include OneBox and Featured Snippets, as offered by Google.

When setting up tracking with Myposeo, you can choose to take universal search results into account in your rankings. For example, if you check news results for a search for “Rooney”, Wikipedia will appear at the top of the list. The tool will consider news results as clickable links with a ranking. In the image below, you can see the news results “goal.com” and “l’équipe” are ranked in positions 2, 3 and 4. If you deactivate the universal search results, “l’équipe” will be ranked in position 2. This option can affect your ranking, so you must be careful when creating your Myposeo SEO tracking project.

universal search address

Another example of localisation follows: if you check the box for “address” type results, the tool will consider all results found through Google Maps. Taking address results into account can change your ranking and give you a better idea of the visibility of results. The search in our example was the brand keyword “Total”. Google nevertheless considered this search as localised and therefore provided Maps results for petrol stations.

Localisation and search volume

The second question you must ask yourself is what keywords and localisation you wish to use.

queries

To choose the keywords we will be using in our project, we will refer to search volumes proposed by Google. It is important to note that Google provides search volumes depending on the localisation and the search. There are three main types of keywords you should know about:

  • Generic keywords that are considered as Localised to within the whole country. For example, if you type “petrol station” in France, Google lists 110,000 monthly searches (in April 2017).
  • Generic keywords that include the city in the search, such as “petrol station Annecy”.
  • Generic keywords that are localised to a city, such as “petrol station” in Annecy.

The search volume for “petrol station” localised to France, the search volume for “petrol station” localised to Annecy. We are not sure, however, that it includes the volume for the search “petrol station Annecy”.

You must therefore either track a generic keyword and choose to localise it to a country or a city, or choose keywords and specify the city directly within the search.

It is essential to choose the right keywords and localisation.

Conclusion

To see how this solution is implemented and the types of reports it provides, we invite you to watch our webinar (video below) starting at minute 11.

Watch our webinar

See more Case Studies​

synergies seo sea
SEO/PPC synergy in Myposeo

In this case, we will be highlighting the synergy between SEO and SEA (PPC) in search results pages. We will see, step by step, how Myposeo Insights can increase your performance and maximise your ROI by combining data collected using the two methods.

Get started with Myposeo

Better customer experience, less worries for your team. Set up only takes a minute!

Subscribe to the Myposeo newsletter