A shop in Da Nang reports that its keyword "air conditioner repair" is sitting in the top 3, yet customers in Da Nang cannot find it anywhere — while an acquaintance in Ho Chi Minh City checks and confirms the top 3 position is real. Nobody is lying: they are simply looking at two different results pages. That is the nature of local SEO: keyword rankings change depending on where the searcher is standing and which device is in their hand.
Why does Google return different results by location?
For searches with local intent — repair services, food and drink, property rentals, medical care — Google understands that users need the results closest to them. It therefore uses the searcher's location (from GPS, IP address, and location history) to reorder results: nearer businesses with good reviews in that area get priority, and pages that serve that exact area get pushed up. The consequences:
- For the same keyword, your website might rank #3 in Ho Chi Minh City but #18 in Hanoi.
- Results also include a map pack with the nearest locations — a separate "ranking race" from regular web results.
- Checking rankings from an office in one province to report to a client in another is wrong from the start.
How do mobile rankings differ from desktop?
Most searches today happen on phones, and Google maintains a separate ordering for mobile. The differences come from several factors: Google favors pages that load fast and display well on small screens; a mobile user's location is pinpointed more precisely thanks to GPS; and the phone results layout is different, with map, image, and video blocks interleaved more heavily. In real SEO practice, it is not unusual for a keyword to sit in the top 5 on desktop but only top 12 on mobile — and mobile users are usually the real customers.
The practical conclusion: if you only check rankings on desktop, you are misjudging most of your customers' actual experience.
How to check local rankings the right way
1. Define your exact "vantage point" for each check
Start by answering: where are your customers? A local service shop only needs to care about rankings in its own city and nearby districts. A nationwide e-commerce store needs a broader picture, but should still break out the major cities for comparison. Every check must record three things: keyword — location — device. Miss one, and the number loses most of its meaning.
2. Do not trust manual checks done from the wrong location
Switching a VPN or spoofing your location can give a quick reference point, but the results are often unstable and hard to reproduce for comparisons over time. Manual checks also give you no movement history. For serious local SEO work, you need a tool that lets you specify the city or province for each check and saves results day by day for each location.
3. Track each key market separately
Instead of one shared keyword list, organize tracking by "keyword × location" pairs: for example, "self-drive car rental" in Ho Chi Minh City and "self-drive car rental" in Da Nang are two separate data rows. When one city drops while another holds steady, you know the issue is about local competition or the landing page's local relevance — perhaps the page never mentions that area, or the business's map profile there is weak.
4. Check both devices at the same time
Schedule parallel checks for mobile and desktop with the same keyword and location. A large gap between the two is a signal to review the mobile experience: how fast the page loads on a 4G connection, whether buttons are easy to tap, and whether the phone number can be called with one tap. Many in-depth articles on reading these signals are collected at the Keyword.help blog if you want to dig deeper.
5. Keep an eye on the map pack as its own ranking
For many local searches, the first thing users see is not a website at all but the map pack: three nearby businesses with ratings, opening hours, and a call button. A business can rank well in the regular web results yet be invisible in the map pack — and for "near me" style searches, the map pack takes most of the taps. Treat the two as separate races. Your website's position is driven by your pages and their local relevance, while your map presence is driven by your business profile: correct address and categories, reviews from local customers, and consistent opening hours. When you review local performance, ask both questions — where does my page rank in this city, and does my business show up on the map here — because the fix for each is completely different.
A common real-world scenario
A clinic chain with locations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City runs SEO for a shared service keyword. The combined report shows an "average rank of 6 nationwide" — which sounds fine. But when the data is split by city, the truth appears: Hanoi ranks #3 while Ho Chi Minh City ranks #21, meaning the southern branch is practically invisible on Google. Only by measuring each location separately does the SEO team know where to focus resources: adding dedicated content for the Ho Chi Minh City branch, optimizing its map profile, and collecting reviews from customers there.
Conclusion
In local SEO, the right question is not "what does this keyword rank?" but "what does this keyword rank, where, and on which device?" Make checking by city and by device a habit from day one, so every optimization decision is based on your customers' real experience. If you need a tool that checks rankings by location in Vietnam automatically every day, take a look at the plans at the pricing page and start with your most important keyword–location combinations.