In one sentence: local questions are answered from a different evidence base than category questions — directories, maps data and location-bearing pages — so both the optimisation and the measurement have to name the place explicitly.
Why "near me" cannot be measured
An engine answering "near me" resolves the location from context you do not control and cannot reproduce. Ask it twice from different network conditions and you may get two different cities. For measurement, the place has to be in the question: "best X in Leeds", not "best X near me". That is the only version that produces a comparable series.
A local prompt set is the category set with a place bound to each question. Bind it explicitly, record which place, and treat each city as its own series.
The consequence people underestimate
Every city you add multiplies the question set, and the quota with it. Ten questions across eight cities is eighty runs per engine per cycle. This is why multi-location measurement is a deliberate, budgeted decision rather than something you switch on — and why it is honest to price it as an add-on rather than pretend it is free.
What the evidence base looks like for local
| Source | What it supplies |
|---|---|
| Map and business listings | Existence, category, address, hours — the facts an answer states |
| Directory pages for the locality | That you are one of the options in that place |
| Location-bearing pages on your own site | The only surface you control; needs the place in the text, not just the footer |
| Local community threads and reviews | Corroboration in the buyer's own words |
Optimising the pages you control
- Put the place in the sentence, not only in the schema. "We fit boilers across Leeds and Bradford" is extractable; a
LocalBusinessblock above prose that never names a city is not. - One page per real location, not per keyword permutation. Pages generated for every town within fifty miles are the local version of scaled content abuse, and they are recognisable as such.
- Keep hours, address and phone identical everywhere. Inconsistency here is the classic entity problem in miniature, and local answers state these facts directly, so errors are visible to the buyer.
- Say what you do not cover. A stated service area is a fact an engine can use; an implied one is not.
Measurement notes specific to local
Run each city as its own series with its own competitor set — the competitors genuinely differ between cities, and carrying one city's set into another produces a share computed against businesses that do not operate there. And record the persona or locale settings used for the run alongside the result, because a local answer is more sensitive to them than a category answer, and a series where that varied silently is not a series.