📌 What Is Share of Local Voice (SoLV)?
Share of Local Voice (SoLV) is a metric popularised by tools like LocalFalcon. It expresses, as a percentage, how often a business appears in the local pack across a grid of search points. Agencies use it to give clients a single headline number that summarises local visibility.
Search Atlas does not use the SoLV label, but the Local Heatmap feature captures the same underlying data and gives you equivalent — and more granular — numbers you can confidently present to clients.
🗺️ How Search Atlas Measures Local Visibility
Every heatmap scan in Search Atlas places a grid of GPS coordinates over a target area and records your business's ranking position at each grid point for a chosen keyword. From those positions the platform calculates two rolled-up metrics that together replace SoLV:
- Average Grid Ranking — the mean rank across every point on the grid. A lower number means stronger overall visibility, directly comparable to what SoLV summarises.
- Share of Grid (Top 3 %) — the percentage of grid points where your business ranks in positions 1–3. This is the closest direct equivalent to SoLV: it tells you what share of the local search landscape your business dominates.
You can track both metrics over time to show clients improving or declining local presence, exactly as you would with SoLV trend charts in other tools.
🛠️ How to Run a Heatmap Scan
- In the left sidebar, click Local.
- Select or create a GBP project from the projects list (/gbp-galactic/gbp-projects).
- Inside the project, open the Local Heatmap tab.
- Choose your target keyword, set the grid size and radius, then click Run Scan.
- Once the scan completes, the heatmap renders colour-coded pins — green for strong rankings, red for weak — alongside the Average Grid Ranking and Share of Grid (Top 3 %) summary cards at the top of the results.
📊 How to Report These Metrics to Clients
When presenting results to clients, frame the metrics clearly so they map to the SoLV concept they may already know:
- Use Share of Grid (Top 3 %) as your primary headline figure — for example, "Your business appears in the top 3 results for 68 % of searches across your target area."
- Pair it with Average Grid Ranking to show depth — a high Share of Grid with a low Average Ranking confirms dominance, not just occasional appearances.
- Run scans at a consistent cadence (weekly or monthly) and compare snapshots to show trend lines, replicating the SoLV-over-time charts clients expect.
- Export the heatmap image directly from the results view to drop into client reports or slide decks.
💡 Tips for Accurate, Comparable Scans
- Keep settings consistent — use the same grid size, radius, and keyword every time you scan so period-over-period comparisons are valid.
- Scan at similar times — local rankings can fluctuate by time of day, so scanning at roughly the same time each period improves data consistency.
- Use keyword variants — run separate scans for each core keyword (e.g. "plumber near me" and "emergency plumber") to build a fuller picture of Share of Grid across your client's service categories.
- Layer with Overview data — navigate to Local → Overview (GBP Profile Completion) to correlate heatmap trends with GBP impression and call data for a complete local performance story.
🆘 Need Help?
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.