How Is Progress Measured?

Why a grid

Distance is a local ranking input, so a firm's visibility is a surface, not a number: strong near the office, decaying outward. Checking one point measures one point. Scanning a grid of points across the service area measures the surface, which is the thing that actually determines whether prospective clients can find the firm.

Seven rules for honest measurement

1. Like-for-like or nothing. Same query set, same points, same method at both ends.
2. State the baseline. A percentage is meaningless without the number it grew from.
3. Grid, not point.
4. Date everything. Results move; an undated screenshot cannot be checked.
5. Show declines. Every campaign has losing months. A report that never shows one is selecting.
6. Separate visibility from outcome. Rankings and grid gains are leading indicators; calls and signed matters are outcomes.
7. Disclose who held the instrument. A measurement by the party being evaluated is first-party evidence.

This network's own case studies, graded

Three “partly” rows. Publishing that assessment is more useful than publishing the case studies alone, because a reader can see exactly where the evidence is thinner than it looks.

What to ask your own agency

• Is visibility reported across a grid, or from one location?
• Are calls tracked and attributed to source?
• Does anything in the report connect to signed matters?
• Has the report ever shown a decline?
• Who ran the measurement?

The fourth question is the most diagnostic and the least expected.

The baseline decides everything after it

A measurement without a before reading is not a measurement, and this is the most common gap in agency engagements, because the baseline has to be taken before any work starts and by then the pressure is to begin producing.

A usable baseline records the grid scan with its parameters, the profile’s state including category and review count, the directory records as found, and the technical state of the site. Where none was taken, the honest position is to say so and start one, treating earlier work as undemonstrable.

Why a single ranking number fails

Local results vary by where the searcher stands, because distance is a direct input. A position quoted without the point it was measured from has not described a measurement, and where the point is unstated it is usually the firm’s own address, which returns the best reading its geography can produce.

A firm can rank first at its own office and be absent four miles away where a third of its prospective clients search. Reporting the first number as “the” ranking is the most common way agency reporting misleads, and it is frequently done without any intent to deceive.

What a grid measures instead

A search grid queries the local results from a lattice of points laid across a city and records the firm’s position at each one. The output is a surface where a single check gives one point, and it shows the distance gradient a single check cannot.

Five parameters have to be held constant between a baseline and a rescan, or the comparison is between two different instruments: the grid centre, its dimensions, its spacing, the query list, and the counting of every point including the ones where the firm did not appear. The scan dates have to be recorded, since a figure without a date cannot be checked.

The pattern carries more information than the average. A firm strong at the centre and absent at the edges is proximity-bound. A firm middling everywhere is usually short on prominence. A firm strong on one side of a city is frequently looking at a competitor concentrated in the other.

Report shapes to be wary of

Four recur often enough to name.

A position with no location. Not a measurement, for the reasons above.

A keyword set that changes between reports. Terms quietly retired and replaced make reports incomparable, and the drift runs one way: hard terms leave and easy ones arrive.

Impressions and traffic in place of positions and cases. Impressions rise for reasons unconnected to the work, and traffic can grow on queries that never produce a client.

Work reported in hours. That describes cost, not result. The countable version names what was published and what was corrected.

The chain that matters

Every measurement sits somewhere on one chain: visibility, then impressions, then clicks and calls, then consultations, then signed matters. Only the last is revenue, and it is the one an agency can least report because it happens inside the firm.

The productive division is for the agency to report the links it can measure honestly and for the firm to hold the last one. Figures published across this network measure visibility and are labelled as a leading indicator rather than a count of cases.

See also
Search grid · Map pack · How long does it take?