Share of Local Voice: the local SEO number most trades have never measured

Share of Local Voice, or SoLV, is the clearest single measure of how visible a local business really is on Google Maps. Most trades have never seen the number, yet it explains more about where their phone calls come from than any other metric. This is what it is and how to read it.

What is Share of Local Voice?

Share of Local Voice is the percentage of your service area where your business appears in the top three of the Google Maps pack for a given keyword. If you scan 49 points spread across the area you serve and you rank in the top three at 25 of them, your Share of Local Voice is roughly 51 percent for that keyword.

It matters because the top three is what customers actually see. The Maps pack shows three businesses before anyone has to tap “more places”, and the vast majority of clicks and calls go to those three. Ranking fourth or lower in a suburb is, in practical terms, being invisible there. SoLV measures how much of your territory you own at that visible level, rather than how you rank from the one spot where you happen to be standing when you check.

How is Share of Local Voice measured?

You lay a grid over your service area, commonly a 7 by 7 grid of 49 points, and at each point you ask Google Maps who ranks for your keyword from that exact location. At every point you note your position. Points where you sit in the top three count as covered. SoLV is simply the covered points divided by the total points, expressed as a percentage.

The grid matters because a single search is misleading. Proximity is a strong ranking factor, so a check from your own address almost always shows you at the top. Sampling many points across the area removes that bias and shows the real spread, including the streets where a competitor is closer and beats you. Each keyword gets its own grid, because a business can dominate one service and barely register for another.

What is a good Share of Local Voice score?

As a working guide, three bands are useful. Above 90 percent means you dominate the area and the job is to hold it. Between 40 and 89 percent is moderate: you win in patches and leak in others, which is where the biggest gains usually sit. Under 40 percent is critical, meaning you are invisible across most of your territory and losing steady work to competitors without seeing it happen.

The reason the bands are worth knowing is that they set the priority. A business at 92 percent does not need more coverage work; it needs to defend and to look at AI visibility next. A business at 6 percent has a coverage emergency that a heat map will pinpoint street by street. The number turns “we should probably do some SEO” into a specific decision about what to fix first.

How is SoLV different from my Google rank?

Your Google rank is a single position from a single location. Share of Local Voice is a distribution across your whole area. Rank tells you how you did in one search; SoLV tells you how much of your market you are actually visible in. The two can disagree sharply. It is common to rank number one when you search yourself and still have a Share of Local Voice under 20 percent, because you only win in the small zone right around your address.

That disconnect is exactly why SoLV is worth measuring. It replaces a comforting but misleading rank with an honest map of where you win and where you leak. If you want to see your own figure, start with a local heat map, which returns your Share of Local Voice per keyword along with the competitors owning the ground you do not.