Identify and monitor locations where you need to focus your local SEO efforts

Whether you have brick-and-mortar locations or serve specific markets, city-level localization is essential to many SEO strategies since local and national search results can differ greatly (especially for retail and hospitality). However, local reporting can quickly become chaotic and nonsensical if you don’t use the right tools.

In Conductor, you can use workspaces to monitor your search performance in one city. This is useful if you’re optimizing pages for a particular city or if you’re responsible for a certain physical location. You can choose any relevant pieces of rank data from Conductor's Keywords report to include in a Workspace, but these are some essentials for local reporting. They cover your biggest wins, quickest opportunities, and areas needing the most improvement:

1. In Conductor, go to the Keywords↗️ report.
2. At the top of the page, ensure the web property and device you want to report on are correct.
3. From the Keywords: Locations filter, select the city you want to focus on.
   Bonus: You can select multiple locations here if you want to report on the performance of an entire region you are responsible for. Just be sure to clearly name your widgets below to indicate the region and the constituent locations.
   
4. In the Select Keyword Groups filter, select your Non-Branded keyword group. If you haven’t created a non-branded group yet, here’s how.
5. In the table, sort the table by highest Monthly Search Volume.
6. In the filters above the table, open Keyword Ranks and select In Top 10 for the most recent time period. Click Apply.
   
7. Add this table to a new Workspace. This widget shows your local non-branded keyword wins. While branded keywords are important, this report is valuable because you’ll see where you are strongest for highly competitive terms. Ranking on Page 1 for your brand name is easier, which means non-branded keywords are a bigger win to show off.
   
8. Name your widget Page 1 Non-Branded Keywords or use your own naming convention. Describe the widget by including the keyword group, device, and location you used and select the relevant reporting time frame.
   
9. Click Add.
10. Open the Keyword Ranks filter again and select Striking Distance for the most recent time period. Click Apply. 
    
11. Add the widget to the workspace you created above. You can reference this widget for quick win opportunities for your local efforts. Keywords on Page 2 usually require the least effort to get to Page 1. Focus optimizations on your ranking content to continually deliver better traffic and conversions with Page 1 results.
    
12. Repeat this process using the following quick filters above the table. Remember to clear your previous filters after adding each widget:
    
    
    • Fell from Top 10
    • Moved into Top 10
    • No Longer Ranking
    These last three widgets are helpful for keeping track of changes in local ranks for your city of interest. Watch out for keywords that fall from Page 1, as this may indicate a need for optimization. Keywords you no longer rank for may be irrelevant or indicate a page change, technical issue, or algorithm update. If you’ve moved keywords into the top 10, that most likely means your optimizations have been effective! Share these wins with your team and try to identify what worked and make it repeatable

What's next?

Together, the widgets in this Workspace provide you with insight into how you perform for keywords in your city of focus. Comparing this performance across Workspaces dedicated to different locations can help you better understand where you need to focus your local SEO efforts and where you are achieving the most success.