Does anyone know of publicly available tools that can track a small number of SERPs for users in different locations?
I'm looking for something that can show differences in organic ranking when the users location is set differently (ie city level and below), rather than local "map" listings or differences between .co.uk and .com for instance.
The only tool I know doing this is linkdex and I am not convinced that they are not just switching IP and hoping Google treat it as a user location change.
Alternatively, another way of doing the same? Anyone done anything like this with phantom.js or another headless browser?
Umm why not have numerous other people do that for you without them knowing it? ;D
Are you thinking turk or something similar?
there are URL parameters you can add which supposedly change your results to the specified area. The extent to which this is true to local listings for users actually in specified location I don't know.
can't remember what they are off top of my head
I'll dig around more for some URL params. Not sure about that though: The work down to country level, but I haven't seen anything that can force the users location yet.
If you manually change your location you do get changed_loc=1 set. However the location seems to be stored as a cookie. I'm not saying it can't be over-ridden with a GET var - just not seen it yet.
https://www.google.ca/preferences (location on the left hand side, seems to be invisible for me on .com)
The param is luul upon saving but is indeed stored internally afterwards and called via relation to your cookie vars.
For searching unforked I guess submitting new preferences would work fine, otherwise you'd want to store some cookies & location values on your side of things.
G seem to be harder to scrape, particularly for 100x results.
Advanced Web Rankings would seem to be a contender: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/video-how-to-customize-google-location.html
Seems like a good excuse to try it out. I've been meaning to for a while, but was too lazy to sort out the proxies
Thumbs up for AWR. We use it extensively locally and gives accurate reports.