Check local rankings weekly. A weekly grid scan catches a change the week it happens and ties it to what you did, while the daily noise averages out. Go daily for two weeks after a change you want to measure, or during a suspected drop. Monthly is enough for a stable business with no active work.
Daily, weekly or monthly
Each interval has a cost, and the costs are different.
Daily shows noise and spends points. Google Maps results shift a little every day. A point that reads 4 on Monday reads 5 on Tuesday and 4 again on Wednesday with nothing changed. Scan daily and you get 30 readings a month, most of them that wobble, and a chart that looks like a heartbeat. You also spend 30 scans of points to learn what 4 would have told you.
Monthly misses the cause. Scan on the 1st and again on the 1st, and a drop on the 9th shows up three weeks later. By then the competitor who took the spots has settled in, the category Google edited has been live for a month, and you have made three other changes in between. You know something happened. You do not know what, or which of your changes was in play.
Weekly is the everyday answer. Four or five readings a month smooth the daily movement. A change shows within a week, close enough to the work you did to connect them. Four weekly scans draw a trend; four daily scans draw noise. For most businesses and most agency clients, weekly on a fixed grid is the schedule that needs no second thought.
When to go daily
Daily is a tool for a fortnight, not a habit. Switch to it when something specific is about to happen, or has just happened.
- After a change you want to measure. You corrected the category, moved the pin, or a batch of reviews went live. Scan daily for two weeks. You will see the day the grid moved, if it moved, and the day it settled. Then go back to weekly.
- During a suspected drop. One scan read worse. Daily scans for a week tell you whether it was a wobble or a fall, and whether a competitor is holding the points they took. The drop guide covers the order to check things in while the daily scans run.
- In the run-up to a report, when you want to be sure the scan you show was not the one odd day.
Daily scans compare against each other. Do not set a Tuesday daily scan against last month’s weekly one and call the difference a trend.
When monthly is enough
Monthly is enough when nothing is being done. A business that has held rank 1 to 3 across its grid for a year, with no campaign running and no competitor on the move, needs a monthly scan to confirm that is still true and nothing more. The same goes for a keyword you track to keep an eye on rather than to work on.
The risk is the one above: a drop can take a month to show. For a stable business that is a fair trade, because the alternative is spending points every week on a grid that does not change. Set the monthly scan on the same day each month, and move to weekly the moment the grid moves.
What makes two scans comparable
None of this works unless two scans measure the same thing. The rule is short: same grid, same spacing, same keyword, same engine. Add the same day of the week if daily movement matters to you.
- Same grid and spacing. A 7×7 at 500 m and a 7×7 at 750 m are different measurements of the same business. The wider one reads worse everywhere, because its outer points are further away. Pick the grid once and leave it.
- Same keyword, spelled the same. “Dentist” and “dentist near me” return different lists. So do “dentist” and “dentists”.
- Same engine. Google Maps and the map box on Google Search rank the same business differently from the same spot. Bing is a different map again. Track each one as its own line.
- Same day of the week, if you scan daily. If the list moves with the day of the week, comparing a Saturday with a Wednesday adds a wobble you did not need. Scanning on the same day removes the question.
A tracker should hold this for you. RankShark Track fixes the grid, spacing, keyword and engine per tracker, runs the scan on the schedule you set, weekly or monthly, with daily on Pro and up, and keeps 25 months of scans, so the scan you compare with was always measured the same way. Scan comparison sets any two side by side.
What a schedule costs in points
Points are the unit a plan is measured in: one point is one search from one spot. The arithmetic for a schedule is grid size × keywords × scans a month.
| Schedule | Working | Points a month |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly 7×7, 3 keywords | 49 × 3 × 4 | 588 |
| Weekly 7×7, 3 keywords, 2 engines | 49 × 3 × 4 × 2 | 1,176 |
| Daily 7×7, 1 keyword, for 2 weeks | 49 × 1 × 14 | 686 |
| Monthly 9×9, 5 keywords | 81 × 5 × 1 | 405 |
So a weekly 7×7 across three keywords is under 600 points a month, and even a small paid plan covers several businesses at that rate. A fortnight of daily scans on one keyword costs about the same as a month of weekly scans on three, which is why daily is a tool for a fortnight.
The free plan is enough to learn the rhythm. Track Free covers one business and 2 keywords with 150 points a month and scans of up to 25 points, Google Maps alone, with no card: a weekly 5×5 on one keyword is 25 × 4 = 100 points. Paid plans start at $29 a month, and the Track plans list the points on each.
What to compare a scan with
Compare this scan with the same scan 4 weeks ago, not with yesterday’s. Two scans a day apart differ by noise. Two scans a month apart differ by whatever happened in the month, which is what you want to know. Set them side by side and look at the shape of the grid before the numbers, then the found count, then the averages and the share of local voice.
For a report, this becomes the “was” column: this month’s number beside the same number from the same scan last month. The client report guide shows where that column goes.
If you have no scan yet, there is no schedule to keep. Run the free audit on your main keyword, note the grid it used, and set a weekly scan so that in 4 weeks you have something to compare it with.