Geo-grid ranking: your Google Maps position isn’t a number, it’s a map.

A geographic matrix used to measure local search visibility from multiple locations across a market, instead of one.

Distance is one of the major components of Google’s local-ranking system, alongside relevance and prominence.

No. It’s a measurement system. Any improvement comes from the optimization work the scan points toward.

49, spaced across a 5 km radius by default, adjusted for the shape of a specific market.

Not by itself. It shows what changed and where; explaining why is a separate diagnostic step.

A geo-grid check places a grid of points across a service area, often a five-by-five or seven-by-seven pattern, and records your Google Maps rank as if the searcher were standing at each point. The results become a colour-coded heat map: green where you rank in the top three, red where you do not. It exposes how Google's distance factor changes your position from one street to the next, which a single rank check hides.

A normal rank tracker runs one search from one fixed spot, usually wherever the tool’s own server sits, and hands back a single number. A geo-grid runs that same search from dozens of points spread across your real market and hands back a map. The number says you rank 4th. The map says where that actually holds true - strong three blocks from the office, gone by the time a customer crosses the highway. One is a speedometer. The other is a road map.

Yes. Digital Handshake Media gives clients the same login used to run the scan, not a summary slide someone else prepared. You can open the real heat map at any point during the 12-week roadmap and check it yourself, the way you’d check your own bank balance instead of taking someone’s word for what it says.

A baseline scan runs before any optimization work starts, and that becomes the fixed comparison point. The grid gets re-scanned again after the 12-week roadmap, using the same points, so the before-and-after measures real change instead of comparing two scans that were never set up the same way. How often it runs after that depends on the market and what changed in it.

Usually, yes. The default grid is 49 points across a 5 km radius, but that default gets stretched and re-spaced to match the real shape of a market. A business covering three rural townships needs a wider net than a business working one dense downtown core, even if both start from the same 49-point baseline.

You might be thinking a geo-grid only makes sense for a business with a storefront customers can walk into? The quick answer is no - it works for service-area businesses too, and the case for it is arguably stronger there. Google’s own guidance lets a service-area business hide its public address and list a coverage area instead, which means there is no single storefront point to check a ranking from in the first place. A geo-grid solves exactly that: it measures visibility across the whole coverage area a mobile electrician, plumber or landscaper actually serves, address or no address.

No. A red point means you were not visible in the top local results for that specific search, from that specific spot, on the day of the scan - nothing more. It is one reading on a larger map, not a verdict on an entire neighbourhood. A few scattered red points in an otherwise green grid is normal. A solid red zone on one whole side of the market is the kind of pattern worth digging into.

Google shows different local results depending on where the searcher is standing, so a rank check from one spot gives you one number that can be right on your street and wrong a few kilometres away. A grid scan runs the same search from many points across your market and records your Google Maps rank at each one, so you can see where you show up and where you disappear. To start for free, try our Google Maps ranking checker or ask for our local SEO audit.