We’ve completed the roll out of another major update to our Local Search Rank Checker tool. Within your local search ranking reports we now display the sub-rank for both carousel and local pack results.

The sub-rank refers to your position within the local pack or carousel, as well the overall ranking position on the page. This update gives you a much broader overview of where you are ranking in both organic & local results.

We have been rolling this update out for a little while now. Many existing BrightLocal customers will have already seen the new feature in their local ranking reports. For pre-existing reports that do not show this ‘sub-rank’ users will need to re-run these reports so that we gather & present sub-ranks.

In your updated ranking reports we still label your overall SERP position as a numeric value (eg. 1-10), but with the new feature, we identify results within a carousel or local pack with a letter (eg. A-E).

Sub-rank explained

Using the screenshot below to illustrate, if you see a number ‘2’ followed by letter ‘A’, this means that your website is in 2nd position on the page and in 1st position (‘A’) in the local pack itself.

  • Carousel – 1, E (1st position in overall results, 5th in carousel)
  • Local – 5, A (5th position in overall results, 1st in local block)

See below for a screenshot of the new feature in Local Search Rank Checker:

 

Local Search Rank Checker update

In the above screenshot, the business ranks in the top 4 positions in Google; the first organic position, and the following 3 local results labelled A, B & C.

You can see a similar result for Bing, as below:

Bing results using Rank Checker

 

In the above example, the business ranks in the top ‘no. 1’ position (organic), followed by a ‘3rd party’ result at ‘no.2’. The local results start at position 3, and this business has the first 4 local pack results (A, B, C & D).

Currently this update is only live for local results in Google & Bing. We will be releasing this feature for Yahoo results in the next few days.

Below is an annotated screenshot which clarifies how we count SERP results. In Bing, a search for ‘coffee new york’ brings up the following results.

  • Overall ranking results – ranking results are labelled 1-8 down the page
  • Local results – start at no.3, are labelled A-E.

 

Overall Ranking and Local Results