“We rank 3rd in Saudi Arabia” sounds like a clear result. But a customer in Riyadh, one in Jeddah and one in Dammam can each see a different page for the same search, and none of them may see you 3rd. For any business that serves customers locally, the city is the unit that matters.
Why country-level rankings mislead
Google uses the searcher’s location to decide which results are most relevant. For keywords with local intent, it changes the results a lot:
- Services and stores. “Furniture store”, “AC repair” or “pharmacy open now” show different businesses in every city.
- “Near me” and implied local searches. Many searches never say “near me”, but Google treats them as local anyway, like “car wash” or “gym”.
- The map pack. The local map block, and how far it pushes organic results down, varies by city.
- City pages. If you have /riyadh and /jeddah pages, Google should show the right one in each city. Often it doesn’t.
Country-level tracking blends all of this into one number. That number can stay flat while you gain in one city and lose in another.
This matters even more in the Gulf. Markets are concentrated in a few large cities, competition differs sharply between them, and many brands serve some cities but not others. Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Jeddah, Cairo and Alexandria are effectively separate search markets.
Which keywords need city tracking
Not every keyword does. A simple rule:
- Track by city: anything a customer would act on locally, such as services, stores, restaurants, clinics, real estate, delivery, and branded searches for multi-branch businesses.
- Track by country: informational and national keywords, like “how to renew a passport” or “best credit cards”, where results barely change between cities.
If you’re not sure, check the keyword in two cities once. If the top 10 is mostly the same, country level is enough.
How to set up city tracking
- List the cities where your customers are. Start with the ones that bring revenue, not every city in the country.
- Use Google’s own location names. Google keeps an official list of locations it can target. Using those names means the search is set to the place Google itself recognises.
- Choose the device. Local searches are mostly on mobile. Track mobile for local keywords, and add desktop only where it matters.
- Set the language. In the Gulf, the same customer may search in Arabic and English. Track both where both bring customers.
- Assign a target page per city. If you have city landing pages, assign /riyadh to the Riyadh keyword, /jeddah to the Jeddah one, and so on.
Keep an eye on volume. A keyword checked in two cities counts as two keyword checks, because it is two different searches. Checks run in the desktop app are unlimited, so it is the easy way to cover many cities. Start with the keyword and city pairs that matter most and expand from there.
Reading city results
Once you have a few checks, look for three patterns:
- Gaps between cities. If you rank 2nd in Dubai and 14th in Abu Dhabi, the problem is local: competition, reviews, local content or links in that city.
- The wrong city page. If Google shows your Riyadh page to Jeddah searchers, your city pages may be too similar, or the Jeddah page may lack local signals.
- Map pack pressure. If organic positions hold but traffic drops in one city, check whether a map pack or AI Overview now sits above you there.
How SERP Tracker does it
In SERP Tracker you choose the country, language and city from Google’s official location list, on desktop or mobile. You can set a default location for a project and override it for single keywords, and you can open any keyword’s live Google page for that location in one click. Every check saves a screenshot, so you can see exactly what searchers in that city saw.
See how location tracking works, or read why your rank tracker and Google often disagree.
