A local heatmap is the color-coded map of a business’s rank and status at every point of a Local Grid, turning the whole grid of searches into a single spatial picture of where the business is strong, weak, or absent.
| Term | Local Heatmap |
|---|---|
| Category | Local SEO and Maps |
| Also known as | Rank Heatmap |
| Where it appears | Local Grid report |
What it means in RankGear
The local heatmap is how the Local Grid report renders its results. Every coordinate point in the grid carries two things — the rank the tracked business held at that point and the status of that lookup — and the heatmap paints all of them onto the map at once. Points where the business ranks well read as one end of the color scale, points where it ranks poorly read as the other, and points where the provider returned nothing are marked distinctly rather than colored as a rank. Instead of scanning a table of coordinates, you see the pattern directly: a warm core, a cooler edge, and any gaps where a lookup failed.
How to interpret it
Read the heatmap as a pattern, not as a set of isolated cells, and pin down what produced it before drawing conclusions. Confirm the exact coordinate center the grid was built around, the provider the results came from, the grid spacing between points, the depth checked at each point, and that the tracked business identity matches the listing you mean to measure. The colors only compare like with like when those parameters are fixed; change the center or the provider and the same business can paint a different map. Treat status markers separately from rank — a point flagged as an error is missing data, not a low rank, and coloring it as a zero would misread the whole area.
| What the point shows | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Strong rank (warm) | The business ranks near the top at this coordinate |
| Weak rank (cool) | The business appears but ranks lower here |
| Not found | The business did not appear in results at this point |
| Provider error | The lookup failed — missing data, not a rank of zero |
Example
A dental practice runs a Local Grid and opens the heatmap. Near the office the points glow warm at positions 1 to 3, a few miles out they cool toward position 15, one southern point comes back “not found,” and a point on the eastern edge is marked as a provider error and left uncolored. The warm-center, cool-edge shading tells the practice its map visibility is tightly bound to proximity; the error point is set aside as missing rather than counted against the average.
Important considerations
- Map rankings are highly proximity-sensitive and can shift with coordinates, zoom level, provider data, and the time the searches ran, so two heatmaps of the same business can differ simply because their grids were centered or run differently.
- Status markers are not ranks. A “not found” point means the business did not appear there, and a provider-error point means the lookup failed — neither should be read or averaged as a rank of zero.
- The colors are a comparative view drawn from one provider’s local data, not a Google ranking score. The heatmap shows how the tracked business compares across points on that provider’s scale; it does not on its own explain or cause any ranking.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.