The challenge
A single "average position" says very little about local search. Results change from one street to the next, because distance from the searcher is one of the things Google ranks on. A business can be first outside its own door and invisible two miles away, and a normal rank check hides that.
Managing Google Business Profiles day to day, we needed to see rankings as a grid over the service area, track them over time and show clients the picture in a form they could read at a glance. We decided to build the tool ourselves and make it available to other businesses and agencies.
The strategy
We treated GBP Pin as we would a client engagement and ran every discipline we sell on it: product design and development first, then the technical SEO, content, structured data and launch campaigns needed for a new site to be found.
Pricing was set to make grid tracking affordable for a single-location business, with four plans that scale by the number of locations tracked, a 14-day free trial and white-label reports for agencies.
What we did
- Design and development. A custom PHP application with geo-grid heat maps, scheduled rank tracking, competitor tracking, review monitoring and white-label reporting, plus an installable web app and an API. See web design and development.
- Technical SEO. A crawlable site structure, an XML sitemap, clear robots rules and fast server-rendered pages. See technical SEO.
- Structured data. Organization, WebSite, SoftwareApplication with each plan as an offer, breadcrumbs and FAQ markup, so search engines and AI systems can read what the product is and what it costs.
- Content. Feature, pricing, comparison and help pages written around the questions people ask when choosing a rank tracker. See content marketing.
- AI search. Direct answers to common questions on the page and in markup, and one consistent description of the product wherever it appears. See AI search optimization.
- Launch campaigns. Paid search and social campaigns to bring the first users in. See Google Ads and social media marketing.
The outcome
GBP Pin is live at gbppin.com. We use it in our own local SEO work to measure visibility across a client's whole service area, and to show the change after profile, review and citation work.
We have not published user, traffic or revenue figures here. What the project shows is the work: the same team that advises on search can design, build, launch and market a product from nothing.
Disclosure: GBP Pin is owned and operated by SBGeeks. This page describes our own product, not work for a client.
