What Is Share of Local Voice (SoLV) and How to Improve It

Ask most local business owners how they rank on Google Maps and you'll get one answer: "I'm number three for plumber." But number three where? Standing in front of their shop? Across town? In the next suburb where half their customers actually live? A single rank number is a snapshot taken from one spot on the map, and it quietly hides the most important truth about local search: your visibility changes block by block.

Share of Local Voice (SoLV) is the metric that fixes this blind spot. Instead of asking "what position am I?" it asks "across my entire service area, how often do I actually show up - and how visible am I compared to everyone else competing for the same searches?" If you run local SEO for yourself or for clients, share of local voice is the single number that comes closest to telling you whether your map presence is actually growing.

What Share of Local Voice Actually Means

Share of Local Voice measures how dominant your business is across a geographic grid of search points for a given keyword. Rather than checking your ranking once, a geo-grid tool checks it dozens of times - once from each point on a grid laid over your service area - and then aggregates those results into a single percentage.

Think of it as your "market share of attention" on the map. A SoLV of 100% would mean you appear at the very top of results from every single grid point for that keyword. A SoLV of 12% means you're winning the visibility battle in only a small slice of your territory. The metric goes by a few names depending on the tool - you may see it called Average Rank Position (ARP), Average Total Rank Position (ATRP), or simply SoLV - but the underlying idea is the same: aggregate visibility across many locations rather than one.

The core insight: in local search there is no single "rank." There is a map of rankings, and share of local voice is the number that summarizes that map.

This is why a single rank checker can be dangerously misleading. You might celebrate a number-one position only to discover that you're number one from your office and effectively invisible three miles away. SoLV exposes that gap immediately. For a deeper look at why proximity warps everything, see our guide on how proximity affects Google Maps ranking.

How SoLV Is Calculated

The math behind share of local voice is straightforward once you understand the grid. Here's how it works in practice:

1. A grid is placed over your service area. A common setup is a 7x7 grid (49 points) or a 9x9 grid (81 points), with each point spaced a fixed distance apart - say, every half-mile or every mile depending on how wide you serve.
2. Your keyword is searched from each grid point. The tool simulates a search as if a user were physically standing at that coordinate, capturing the Map Pack and local finder results that a real person at that spot would see.
3. Your position is recorded at every point. You might be #1 in the center, #6 to the north, and not ranking at all (often shown as 20+) at the edges.
4. The results are aggregated into a percentage. Each ranking position is converted to a visibility weight (a #1 is worth far more than a #15), and those weights are averaged across all grid points to produce your SoLV score.

Because higher positions get more weight, share of local voice rewards dominance, not just presence. Showing up at #18 across the whole grid yields a low score; owning the top three across the same grid yields a high one.

A simple worked example

Imagine a small 3x3 grid with nine points. Suppose you rank #1 at three points, #4 at three points, and don't appear in the top results at the remaining three. A naive average would lump those together and lose the nuance. A weighted SoLV calculation, by contrast, gives heavy credit to the three #1s, partial credit to the #4s, and zero to the points where you're absent - then divides your earned visibility by the maximum possible (ranking #1 at all nine points). The result might land somewhere around the low-to-mid range, instantly telling you that despite three top spots, you're capturing only a fraction of the available visibility. That single percentage is far more honest than "I rank #1 for plumber." If you're new to reading these visualizations, our explainer on how to read a geo-grid heatmap walks through the colors point by point.

SoLV vs. a traditional rank tracker

A traditional local rank tracker typically reports one position per keyword. That's fine for tracking organic web rankings, but local search is fundamentally spatial. Share of local voice captures the geography that a single number throws away - which is exactly why agencies rely on it to prove progress to clients who otherwise can't see the difference between "ranking" and "ranking everywhere."

Why SoLV Is the Metric That Actually Matters

There are three reasons share of local voice deserves a permanent spot on your reporting dashboard:

• It reflects reality. Your customers don't all search from your front door. They search from homes, offices, school pickup lines, and parking lots scattered across your service area. SoLV measures the visibility those real searchers actually experience.
• It's harder to fake and harder to misread. You can't cherry-pick a flattering location to screenshot. A rising SoLV means you're genuinely expanding your footprint, not just clinging to one lucky spot near your pin.
• It tracks expansion, not just position. The real goal of local SEO isn't to be #1 in one spot - it's to expand the radius where you appear at all. SoLV is one of the few metrics that shows that radius growing or shrinking over time.

When a client asks "is my SEO working?", a screenshot of a heatmap shifting from red-and-orange to green-and-blue tells the story instantly. SoLV puts a single trackable number on that visual, so you can report a clean before-and-after rather than a vague "trust me, it's improving."

How to Improve Your Share of Local Voice

SoLV is an outcome, not a lever you pull directly. You improve it by improving the underlying signals Google uses to rank you across a wider area. Here are the highest-leverage moves, roughly in order of impact.

1. Optimize your Google Business Profile relentlessly

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the foundation of every map ranking. The biggest, most common mistakes are also the easiest to fix:

• Primary category. Choose the single most accurate primary category, then add relevant secondary categories. The wrong primary category quietly caps your ceiling at every grid point. See how to choose GBP categories.
• Complete every field. Services, attributes, hours, a keyword-rich description, and a steady stream of GBP posts all feed relevance signals that Google reads when deciding whether to surface you.
• Photos. Profiles with regularly updated, accurately captured photos tend to outperform stale ones, both for ranking and for the click-through that follows.

Work through our full Google Business Profile optimization checklist before touching anything else - it's the cheapest SoLV gain available, and most businesses leave easy points on the table here.

2. Build relevance with reviews and on-page signals

A consistent flow of reviews that naturally mention your services and your city strengthens relevance, which helps you rank from grid points further out. Reviews are not just social proof for humans; the language inside them helps Google associate your profile with specific services and locations. Pair that with strong on-page local SEO signals on your website: location-specific service pages, your NAP (name, address, phone) in crawlable text rather than buried in an image, and content that genuinely matches what searchers want. Relevance is what lets you overcome distance - when Google is highly confident you're the best match, it will surface you from grid points where a weaker competitor's proximity would otherwise win. In practical terms, this is how a business pushes its green zone outward block by block instead of staying boxed in around its pin.

3. Win the prominence battle

Prominence - how well-known and trusted your business is - is the third pillar of the local algorithm alongside relevance and distance. Citations on authoritative directories, links from local websites, press mentions, sponsorships, and overall review volume and velocity all build it. Prominence is what extends your green zone outward on the heatmap, because a prominent business can rank from far away where a less-established one simply cannot compete. It tends to be the slowest of the three pillars to move, which is exactly why it's such a durable advantage once you have it. For the full picture, read our breakdown of Google Maps ranking factors.

4. Target your weak grid points specifically

This is where geo-grid data stops being a report and becomes a strategy. Look at your heatmap and find the directions where you fade from green to orange to red. Those weak edges are usually clustered toward a specific neighborhood, a competing town, or the side of your service area where a strong rival is anchored. Once you know where you're losing, you can act on the geography rather than guessing:

• Create or strengthen content aimed squarely at the neighborhoods and cities where you're weak, using the actual place names locals use.
• Pursue reviews from customers in those underperforming areas - a handful of reviews mentioning an outlying suburb can nudge that whole corner of the grid.
• Build or earn a few local citations and links tied to the weak region so Google associates you with it.
• If you serve multiple towns, build dedicated, genuinely useful pages for each - see how to rank in multiple cities on Google Maps.

The payoff is that you're spending effort precisely where it converts into SoLV gains, instead of pouring more work into the center of the grid where you already dominate.

5. Track, then iterate on a schedule

SoLV only becomes useful when you measure it consistently. Run a baseline scan, make your changes, then re-scan on a fixed cadence - weekly or bi-weekly for active campaigns, monthly for maintenance - so you can attribute movement to specific actions rather than to random day-to-day noise. Without a baseline you're flying blind; without a cadence you can't tell a real trend from a temporary blip. Our guide on how often to run a geo-grid scan covers the right frequency for your situation, and the broader how to rank in the Map Pack guide ties these tactics together into a single campaign.

Putting It All Together

Share of Local Voice turns the messy, location-dependent reality of Google Maps into one honest number you can actually move. Optimize your Business Profile, build relevance and prominence, attack your weak grid points by name, and re-measure on a schedule. Do that consistently and you'll watch your heatmap shift from a tiny island of green into territory you genuinely dominate - and you'll have the numbers to prove it to yourself or to a client.

The hard part is seeing the map in the first place - and that's exactly what a geo-grid tracker is for. Start tracking your Share of Local Voice with ProMapRanker and run your first geo-grid scan in minutes, or compare plans to see which fits your business or agency. If you'd rather hand the whole thing off, our team also offers done-for-you local SEO that moves SoLV for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good Share of Local Voice score?

There's no universal threshold, because it depends entirely on your competition and the size of your grid. The right way to judge SoLV is against your own past scores and against your direct competitors on the same grid and keyword. A SoLV that's climbing month over month - and that exceeds your nearest rivals - is the goal. In low-competition rural areas a leader can reach a high share simply because few businesses are splitting the visibility; in dense urban markets a market leader may dominate with a much lower percentage, because there are far more competitors carving up the same grid. Treat the number as relative, not absolute.

How is Share of Local Voice different from average ranking?

Average ranking is a simple mean of your positions across grid points, and it treats a #1 and a #5 as only a few places apart. Share of local voice is weighted toward top positions and expressed as a percentage of total possible visibility, so it more accurately reflects that the top few results capture the overwhelming majority of clicks and calls. Many tools report both ARP/ATRP (average positions) and SoLV (weighted visibility share) side by side, and reading them together gives you the fullest picture.

How often does SoLV change?

It shifts whenever the underlying rankings shift, which can happen as Google refreshes results, as competitors make changes to their own profiles, and as your own optimization takes effect. Map rankings update continuously rather than on a fixed schedule, so re-scanning on a regular cadence is the only reliable way to see your true trend instead of overreacting to day-to-day noise. A single scan is a snapshot; a series of scans is the story.