Local SEO Basics
Situation
therankingstore.com is The Ranking Store’s own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and it is not a client. On 15 August 2026 The Ranking Factory began asking AI engines the questions people ask about the site’s subjects — rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, backlink and link building services, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines — and listing every subject it found missing from the site as a gap to close. The starting point was the answers engines already give, not a keyword tool. The local side of that gap rests on a documented basic: Google’s Business Profile guidance tells businesses to define service areas and specialties so they can “signal to local customers exactly what you do and where you work — even if you operate without a physical storefront” (Get Listed on Google, Google).
What was done and why
We ran The Ranking Factory on therankingstore.com. Between 28 August and 21 October 2026 it wrote and published 112 pages on the site, one subject per page, and submitted every one of them to IndexNow. The pages covered rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines. On 9 October we added our crawler log to the site through our WordPress plugin, so we could see which crawlers fetched each page instead of inferring it. Roughly once a week from 15 August to 21 October the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and each answer’s sources were checked for the site’s pages.
Outcome
By 23 October 2026, 75 of the 112 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer; the first was cited on 4 September. By 21 October, 34 of the pages had been cited in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store. Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 13, and Google AI Overviews were the first to cite 5. Between 9 and 21 October the crawler log recorded a fetch of every one of the 112 pages, 104 of them by a crawler whose identity was verified.
What it shows
The gap list came from answers rather than assumptions, and the follow-up used the same method: the same questions, asked again, with sources read. One subject per page kept each page answerable, and publishing on therankingstore.com meant the citations landed on the site The Ranking Store already runs.
Source: Get Listed on Google — Google.
References
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Local SEO Research
- Reference: Choosing a web design or local SEO agency in Havre de Grace: an honest comparison
- Reference: Link Building Basics
- Reference: Local SEO software
- Reference: Selecting Search Engine Ranking Software for Automated SEO and Local Visibility
- Reference: Mobile local search optimization
- Reference: How to choose a rank tracking platform for local and organic SEO