Share of Local Voice: What It Is and How to Measure Yours

Why average rank isn't enough

Say you ran a grid scan and your average rank came out at 8. What does that tell you?

Not much. Two very different situations produce the same average:

• You're 8th at every point — never in the top three anywhere
• You're 1st across half the grid and absent from the other half

The first is an even weakness. The second is a regional cliff. Same number, completely different situations, completely different work plans.

What Share of Local Voice does

Local Falcon introduced this metric and the industry adopted it. What it does is simple: instead of looking only at what position you hold, it looks at how many points you're visible at, and folds both into a single ratio.

Points where you rank high count more, lower positions count less, points where you don't appear count zero. The output is a percentage: how much of the total visibility in that area belongs to you.

What the number tells you

A single SoLV figure is neither good nor bad on its own. Its value is in comparison:

Against your own history. 14% last month, 21% this month means the work moved something. Average rank doesn't show that as clearly.

Against competitors. If yours is 14% in the same area and the business above you sits at 38%, the gap is a concrete number.

Across keywords. If you take 30% on one phrase and 4% on another, you've found where the work is.

Careful: change the area, change the number

SoLV depends on the grid you scanned. Widen the grid — cover more ground — and your percentage drops, because distant points where you don't appear now count.

That isn't a flaw, but it means any comparison has to use the same grid, the same radius and the same keyword. Two SoLV figures from different grids aren't comparable.

Explaining it to a client

This is where SoLV earns its keep. "Your average rank went from 8 to 6" means little to an agency client. "Your share of visibility in the area went from 14% to 21%" lands.

Even so, put the map next to it. One percentage can't show where you won and where you're still invisible.

In Memin

Every Memin scan reports top-three coverage, the share of points where you were listed, and the ranking gap separately — alongside the heatmap that shows what happened where. You can read the difference between one scan and the next side by side.