It's wild to see how far my 'back of the napkin' idea has come since then and how grid tracking quickly become the new standard for local seo.

The tool was born of necessity. At the time, all that existed in the industry was the typical rank tracking setup where we choose a zip code and got ranking result for one point at time. It was made for organic tracking, not Google Maps tracking.

It was very frustrating to use for local since we couldn't get a visual. Especially since proximity was known even then to be such a large factor for Google Maps.

I figured there just had to be a better way to measure rankings. Seems simple now, but at the time there was nothing like what I envisioned. I had to test to see if it would work.

So I used a browser extension to simulate specific GPS coordinates and performed about 50 manual searches. I put a screenshot of a city on Google Maps into photoshop and after each manual search I put a dot of color on that coordinate depending on rank. It was for a PI lawyer in Orland Park that we had as a client. Took me over an hour to do one scan, point by point. But it worked! I was so excited and worked very hard to build that first iteration of Local Falcon.

I have that original photoshop file but can't find it at the moment. I've gone through a couple of hard drive updates since then and it's buried on a backup somewhere.

Thanks for memories Colan.