How Can You See Search Results As If You’re There?

Background: At a recent webinar conducted by DBE, someone asked how we know what search results look like on the west coast if the DBE team is on the east coast. How does an optimizer or a paid search manager research the landscape and check results for locations other than his/her own?
Here are a few answers:

SEO tools such as BrightEdge, Searchmetrics, and seoClarity enable us to request a local search engine view of natural results.

We can also use the Google AdWords preview tool:

https://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview/

When you enter your location, this tool lets you preview Google natural search results as if you had been searching from that location. For example, if you set your zip code to 95404, when you search for casinos using this tool, you’ll get the following results. You can see how the local pack results are customized for the location.

Bing provides a similar tool: http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/ad-preview-and-diagnostics-tool

You can specify your location in your search setting:

For example, when we do this and say we’re in zip code 95404, we get this result:

Bing also lets you specify your location via a search setting:






When your location is set to San Francisco, you get the results relevant to that city.



Using these methods, you can check both SEO and PPC results.

You will hear others say that Chrome and Firefox extensions are also available to mimic location, but to date we haven’t found them to be reliable.

Let us know if you have other ways to see what search results look like when you’re here and not there.