2024 Local Visibility Index

Wondering Where Your Company Ranks?

Introducing the SOCi 100 and Our Biggest Local Visibility Index Ever

This year marks the sixth anniversary of the SOCi Local Visibility Index (LVI). We established the report to benchmark the performance of multi-location brands across the most important and influential digital channels for driving foot traffic and sales at the local level:

In order to obtain top visibility and performance in local digital marketing, brand marketers must understand the interconnectedness of the three pillars of localized marketing — search, reputation, and social. If any of these three pillars is lacking, a company’s overall marketing success can be impacted. For instance, brand reputation can be diminished by a low volume of positive reviews, which also tends to drive down local search rankings, in turn reducing local conversions.

This year’s report demonstrates that brands are continuing to neglect many of the key priorities in localized marketing. Too many brands ignore their local reviews, fail to claim and consistently update their local store profiles, and neglect the priority of building local audiences on social platforms.

Brands must also pay close attention to emerging trends in search and social, such as those outlined below.

Wondering where your business ranks against others in your industry and amongst U.S. multi-location businesses in general?

Request a SOCi LVI report that shows how your company ranks and reveals opportunities for dominating local markets!

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The SOCi 100

Top Local Brands by State

2024 Local Visibility Index
The SOCi 100 Most Visible Local Brands:
Who’s Winning, Who’s Struggling, and Why

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Key Takeaways

What We Measure

The SOCi LVI does not assess a brand's recognizability or visibility at the national or regional level; our focus is exclusively on a brand’s local market visibility in the channels where local search, discovery, and over 84% of commerce happens, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. For example, the restaurant brands that show up in the top results for searches like “burger place sacramento" are often very different from the national brands consumers tend to search for by name. We apply over 100 measurements to every store or office we analyze, looking at the most important factors that drive discoverability and overall online visibility, such as local ranking, star ratings, review response, onsite and offsite SEO, local followers, and local engagement.

All of these factors are weighted and scored in order to produce two results for every business:

1. An Optimization Score that measures to what extent a business has put into practice all of the tactical optimizations that experts agree should drive better local visibility and performance

2. A Performance Score that judges how highly ranked and rated a business actually is and how successfully they’re engaging with local audiences

The online platforms we examine for the SOCi LVI are Google, Yelp, and Facebook, which stand as representations of the most important consumer channels for search, reputation, and social. We acknowledge the importance of channels like Instagram, TripAdvisor, and Apple Maps for local visibility, but our focus is deep analysis of these three representative platforms. Generally, strong performance on Google, Yelp, and Facebook indicates strong overall performance in local channels.

Key Trends in the Most Influential Digital Channels

Search Tightens Its Focus

In the last year or more, Google has deliberately decreased the volume of search results that include a Local Pack (also known as a 3-Pack), in an effort to dial back cases where local results did not match user intent. Correspondingly, the Local Packs that still appear are likely more relevant to the searcher’s needs; but competition is fiercer for fewer opportunities.

Thus, the importance increases of providing both base-level accuracy of information and depth of optimization to make sure online profiles address all consumer needs.

The SOCi 100 identifies the 100 most visible local brands in every state.

We celebrate the top performing brands, but we also find that many brands neglect key opportunities on the popular platforms where local buying decisions are made.

Brands who don't perform as well stand to lose millions in local revenue. We calculate the total opportunity size of localized marketing at $54.1B in revenue every year.

The key to top local visibility is a combination of strong search optimization, effective reputation management, and a localized social media strategy.

Brands can use our industry-specific benchmark metrics to focus their strategies and set goals to outperform the competition.

Social Expands Its Reach

A recent Forbes study revealed that one in four of all consumers only or primarily use social for search. Consumers, especially in younger age groups, are increasingly turning to social platforms over search engines, for local as well as many other search needs. SOCi’s Consumer Behavior Index (CBI), released in February 2024, found that consumers aged 18-24 were more likely to use Instagram (67%) and TikTok (62%) than Google Search (61%) when looking up a local business.

Even Facebook, which tends to attract more older consumers, was third overall in the rankings of local platforms for all age groups behind only Google Search and Google Maps. Businesses looking to market themselves locally must have a robust social strategy.

SOCi LVI Benchmarks for 2024

Search Benchmarks

Reputation Benchmarks

Social Benchmarks

The Role of AI in Local

AI is changing the game in local marketing as in so many other industries. The impact of this still-emerging technology is already significant in three areas related to the SOCi LVI: data analysis, search interfaces, and marketing automation.

AI Transforms the Search Interface

As we know, Google and Bing have both been hard at work incorporating AI into their search interfaces. Most significantly, Google launched AI Overviews (AIOs) in May 2024, after a year of experimentation with Search Generative Experience (SGE). Microsoft, early in 2023, had already rolled out an integration of Bing search with ChatGPT.

Google, Bing, and similar AI platforms like Perplexity and Meta.AI, all handle local queries at a deeper level of granularity than we’ve been used to in the past, requiring local marketers to up the level of specificity and the richness of information they provide to consumers.

AI Automation Comes to the Rescue for Multi-Location Businesses

The demand to optimize local profiles more deeply and comprehensively than ever before is felt most acutely by large multi-location businesses. A small business has one or a few locations to worry about; a brand with 100 locations has 100 times as many fields and features to juggle, optimize, and monitor. Many opportunities are missed along the way without the benefit of AI automation, which is transforming SaaS for multi-location companies by giving them the means to implement local optimization at a scale that was impossible before.

Scaling the SOCi LVI with AI

Fundamentally, we’d never have been able to analyze thousands of businesses at the scale and depth of the SOCi LVI without the help of AI. In the past, data gathering and analysis, though automated with APIs and stored procedures, involved a large amount of manual effort.

Today, much of that effort can be alleviated with the use of LLMs. The SOCi LVI report this year was produced with lots of help from ChatGPT as well as OpenAI’s API, which assisted with writing SQL queries, sifting and sorting businesses into categories and subcategories, double checking results for accuracy, and many other tasks.

The High Cost of Invisibility

We’ve developed a model that quantifies the opportunity represented by strong performance in search, reputation, and social, broken out by industry. We attribute cost to poor search performance where stores and offices fail to appear prominently in search results. Missed local revenue is also attributed to lost conversions when brands ignore their reviews, especially negative reviews. In social, when companies fail to build audiences at the local level, they lose value in both repeat and new business.

It’s clear from our analysis that companies are leaving millions of dollars on the table by failing to engage with local audiences and provide them with the information and feedback they need to make local buying decisions. The total size of the opportunity in localized marketing for multi-location brands is $54.1B every year. (See more about our calculations in the Methodology section below.)

Annual Opportunity Cost of Localized Marketing

Methodology

The 2024 SOCi LVI includes 2,791 multi-location companies divided into five industry groups: Retail, Food & Beverage, Financial Services, Local Services, and Property. To produce the rankings and scores in the SOCi LVI, we analyzed a statistically valid sample set of approximately 350,000 store and office locations, applying more than 100 metrics to each location in the categories of search, reputation, and social. Data for the report was gathered by our analytics partner Places Scout.

We assessed the online profiles of each store or office location on Google, Yelp, and Facebook, measuring factors in these categories:

In total, the number of store and office locations represented by the companies included in the SOCi LVI is approximately 2.8M, representing the majority of companies in the U.S. with 50 or more locations for all other industries and 10 or more locations for Property Management.

To calculate the opportunity cost of localized marketing, we relied on SOCi research including Top Ranking and Conversion Factors for Local Search and The State of Google Reviews; a commissioned study from Localogy on typical transaction values by industry; earned media values from the Ayzenberg Social Index; and internal SOCi data.

The SOCi LVI and Your Business

The SOCi 100 Most Visible Local Brands:
Who’s Winning, Who’s Struggling, and Why

SOCi 100 brands know how to appeal to consumer needs and turn every store or office location into a local favorite.

Congratulations to the SOCi 100

The SOCi LVI results showed many companies competing neck-and-neck for placement in the list of the top 100 local brands. Many showed strength in optimization of online profiles and engagement with local audiences, but to reach the coveted position of becoming a SOCi 100 brand, they also had to exhibit strong performance in the form of high star ratings and rankings in local searches. Only the combination of effective optimization and strong performance puts brands in the winner’s circle.

Our chart defines four quadrants for measuring brand performance:

Low Visibility: Brands are working to improve their local visibility, but more work remains to be done.

Limited Visibility: Brands are doing a lot of the optimization work required to compete, but haven’t yet achieved top performance on all platforms.

Moderate Visibility: Brands are performing well on some platforms, but haven’t yet done all the work required to optimize their online presence everywhere.

High Visibility: Brands are effectively combining strong optimization with high performance.

What Defines a High Visibility Brand?

So what defines a High Visibility brand? In the SOCi LVI, High Visibility brands aren't just nationally recognizable companies that consumers may be used to searching for by brand name, like Starbucks or McDonald's. Our top companies are the ones that compete successfully for visibility in keyword searches for terms like "coffee near me," where numerous companies large and small are vying for attention. They're the companies that take the time to engage with local audiences on social, building loyalty and repeat business. Our Highly Visible brands, many of them regional or niche companies, know how to differentiate themselves locally.

Here are some of the notable stats that differentiate companies in the High Visibility quadrant from the competition.

High Local Visibility = High Local Traffic and Revenue

Strong visibility in local platforms equates to local dollars. SOCi research has shown that brands in the top SOCi LVI rankings grow year-over-year revenue at 2-3X the rate of the average company. This makes sense: consumers spend money with companies who treat digital channels as their virtual storefronts, offering helpful information, useful content, and meaningful engagement.

At the heart of the SOCi LVI report are the benchmark metrics that identify the minimum level required to outperform the average competitor. We benchmark a broad range of performance metrics for local stores and offices in search, local reviews, and social, with only a selection of top metrics featured here.

According to our search benchmarks, multi-location brands are doing a reasonably good job of claiming and completing their profiles on Google, with some room for improvement on Yelp and Facebook. Competition is stiff to achieve high rankings in the Google 3-Pack, on page 1 of Yelp, and especially on page 1 in Google organic results.

2024 SOCi LVI Search Benchmarks

Ratings and volume of review activity differ significantly by industry as shown in our reputation benchmarks, with the average company tending to have higher star ratings on Google and Facebook than on Yelp. On Google, less than half of reviews get a response from the business, and response rates on Yelp and especially Facebook are significantly lower (here we are looking at all reviews published in the last 12 months). Response times need improvement as well, with the average response time on Google coming in at a rather slow 6.0 days.

2024 SOCi LVI Reputation Benchmarks

Multi-location companies are successfully building audiences on Facebook, and making a reasonable effort to share content with those audiences by posting an average of 7.9 times per month. We see a healthy mix of photo and video content, but audience engagement at just 0.53% on average is low. Facebook does limit the reach of business content, but brands can still do a better job of sharing content that is useful, informative, or entertaining, rather than merely promotional. Posting content that appeals to local audiences increases engagement and broadens overall reach, helping businesses find new customers.

2024 SOCi LVI Social Benchmarks

The Struggles of Low Visibility Brands

In contrast with High Visibility brands, many companies in the Low Visibility quadrant in our overall dataset have yet to master the priorities of localized marketing. Here are some of the features that define lower-performing companies. 

The SOCi LVI has proven to be an authoritative source of the metrics that matter for local visibility. Our methodology has evolved over the years, keeping pace with changes in local algorithms and consumer trends. This year’s report marks one of the most significant steps in the SOCi LVI’s evolution, as we expand the report's scope to include the majority of multi-location businesses in the United States.

We’ve examined 2,791 companies this year, representing 2.8 million store and office locations — four times more companies than in last year's report. Our extensive analysis now encompasses the majority of the U.S. brands with 50+ locations, allowing us to debut the SOCi 100 — a definitive ranking of the 100 most visible local brands in the nation — and identify the most visible local brands in every state.

Search: Visibility on the platforms consumers use to seek out information about local businesses.

Social: Presence in local markets on social platforms and ability to build and engage with local audiences.

Reputation: Consumer ratings and reviews and the responses attentive brands provide to local consumer feedback.

Because the visibility we focus on in the SOCi LVI is local visibility, we've also determined the rankings of the most visible companies in every U.S. state. You'll note in these state rankings many companies that are also found in our top 100, but there are lots of state-specific variations to be found as well, reflecting consumer preferences and regional favorites.

Local search result for "burger place sacramento" on Google

Our scoring system allows us to uncover specific factors that may be diminishing or boosting visibility for certain brands and industries, offering brand marketers a concrete set of opportunities for improving digital presence and, ultimately, foot traffic to local stores and offices.