Can I see my local ranking for a specific neighborhood in Search Console?

No. Search Console can filter by country but not by city or neighborhood. For that level of detail you need manual checks from the area, a paid local rank tool, or the search terms in your Business Profile performance data.

Does adding keywords to my business name help?

Google's guidelines say your business name should match how it appears in the real world. Adding extra keywords can get the profile suspended, so it isn't worth the risk.

How often should I check local rankings?

Weekly or every two weeks is enough. Local results change with distance and time of day, so focus on the trend over a month rather than on any single check.

How to Track Local Google Rankings

If you run a business that serves people in a particular area, such as a dental practice, a café, a roofer or a yoga studio, "where do I rank?" has two answers. There's your place in the local results, the map and list of businesses that appears for searches like "dentist near me", and there's your place in the ordinary web results below it. They're ranked differently and need to be tracked differently.

Two kinds of results

For searches with local intent, Google usually shows a map with a short list of businesses, often called the local pack or map pack. These listings come from Google Business Profiles. Tapping "more places" opens a longer list in Google Maps.

Below that are the usual web results: your website, directory sites, review sites and competitors' websites.

You can rank well in one and poorly in the other. A business with a strong profile and lots of reviews can be in the map pack while its thin website sits on page two. A well-written website can rank in the web results for a business that has barely touched its profile.

What decides local rankings

Google's own help pages name three main factors for local results:

Relevance: how well a profile matches what someone searched for. Accurate categories, services and a complete description help here.
Distance: how far the business is from the searcher, or from the location named in the search.
Prominence: how well known the business is, based on things like reviews, ratings, links and mentions across the web, and the strength of its website.

Distance is the one you can't change, and it's why local rankings vary so much. Someone searching from two blocks away and someone searching from across town can see completely different packs. Picture your position as a map: strongest near your door, fading as searchers get farther away.

Track your website in Search Console

Search Console doesn't filter by city, but it's still the best free source for your website's local searches. Open the Performance report, filter to your country, and look in the Queries tab for searches that include your town, neighborhoods or "near me". Those are your local web searches.

Pick a handful and track their average position weekly, as described in our weekly rank report guide. Because Search Console averages across everyone who searched, including people far away, treat these as trends rather than exact positions.

Search Console doesn't report map pack positions. Those happen on Google's local surfaces, which it doesn't cover.

Use your Business Profile performance data

Google Business Profile has a Performance view. Among other things it shows how many people found your profile, the actions they took (calls, website clicks, direction requests) and a list of the search terms that showed your profile, month by month.

That list of search terms is very useful. It tells you what people type when they find you, which isn't always what you'd expect. Use the top terms as your local keyword list. If the monthly numbers for a term rise, you're showing up for it more often.

Check by hand, consistently

To see where you appear in the map pack, you have to search. Since location changes everything, a manual check only means something if you control the conditions:

Pick three to five spots that matter: your own street, the busiest part of your service area, and one or two places near its edges.
Search on your phone with location services on, from each spot, in a private tab, signed out.
Use the same wording each time: the terms from your Business Profile performance data are a good choice.
Write down your position in the pack or the longer list, and the spot you searched from.

In the rank log, you can add each place as its own keyword ("dentist near me, Main St" and "dentist near me, north side"), choose "Manual search" as the source and use the note field for anything unusual. Over a few weeks you'll see where you're strong and where you fade out.

Ask staff or regular customers to help with this. A colleague who lives across town can run the same search every Monday.

Paid local rank trackers do this at scale by simulating searches from a grid of points. For a small business, a few honest manual checks plus Business Profile data usually tell you enough.

Improve what you can control

Once you're tracking, a few steps reliably help local visibility:

Complete your profile. Pick the most accurate primary category, add secondary ones that genuinely apply, fill in services, hours (including holiday hours), photos and a plain description.
Keep your details consistent. Your business name, address and phone number should match across your website, your profile and the main directories.
Ask for reviews. Ask happy customers to leave a review and reply to the reviews you get, good and bad. Google's rules forbid paying for reviews or offering incentives for them.
Build a page for each service and area you really serve. Write genuinely different pages with local detail, not copies that swap the town name.
Keep your name honest. Use your real business name with no extra keywords. Keyword stuffing in the name breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.

Read local data with patience

Local results shift with time of day (businesses marked closed may show less), with competitors opening or closing, and with every review. Expect wobble. Compare the same places, the same wording and the same weekday over a month or two, and you'll know whether your work is paying off.

For more on why one searcher's results differ from another's, see why your Google ranking is different for every searcher. Google's explanation of local ranking factors is in its help article on how to improve your local ranking on Google.

Questions

Can I see my local ranking for a specific neighborhood in Search Console?: No. Search Console can filter by country but not by city or neighborhood. For that level of detail you need manual checks from the area, a paid local rank tool, or the search terms in your Business Profile performance data.
Does adding keywords to my business name help?: Google's guidelines say your business name should match how it appears in the real world. Adding extra keywords can get the profile suspended, so it isn't worth the risk.
How often should I check local rankings?: Weekly or every two weeks is enough. Local results change with distance and time of day, so focus on the trend over a month rather than on any single check.

How to Track Local Google Rankings for a Small Business