Some time ago (or better: once upon a time… it as been almost a year) Google changed the number of local results or ‘place pack’ from 7 to 3, making the desktop and mobile experience the same. This is what happens if you search for a plumber (loodgieter) in the Dutch town Lisse on your mobile: you’ll get a local pack and no websites:
On mobile only the phone number and the adres are shown.
On the desktop, the website does get shown. And that one is measured again in SEO Effect. The revamped place pack went below our radar due to the change van 7 naar 3, oddly enough.
Search result on desktop with a local pack and websites:
How to measure local rankings?
Place packs appears in the SERPS when a search has local relevance. Typically words like ‘plumber’ and ‘pizza’ but also ‘mortgage’. Also when you add a place or city in your search frase like ‘chocolat New York’
To measure this for the city of your choosing in SEO Effect you need to create a search engine profile for ‘local’. This older blogpost has more on setting up local rankings in SEO Effect.
Where to find local rankings in SEO Effect?
This is indicated by a character that follows after the rank number. For example 1B means that you rank number 2 in the ‘place pack’, where the ‘place pack’ itself ranks number 1. A seccond indicator is the local icon in the column ‘Type’.
Good to have this working properly again!
So next to mobile rankings use local rankings in your SEO efforts as well and catch those local searches!