Local SEO A/B Testing at Scale — Emulate Searches from Any Location

SEO has long since moved beyond being just a technical exercise of optimizing websites and pages. Today, it’s a crucial part of digital marketing. Many companies looking to strengthen their organic search presence experiment with different strategies to outperform competitors — whether by catching up, overtaking them, or leaving them so far behind they can’t recover.

But SEO isn’t a fixed set of “do this and that to get results” rules. On the contrary, search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, becoming more complex and nuanced. Increasing emphasis is placed on behavioral signals and tailoring search results to specific audiences and locations.

So how do you avoid mistakes and execute everything at the highest level? That’s exactly what we’ll unpack here. This article is all about A/B testing for local SEO.

What Is Local SEO A/B Testing and Why It Matters

Local SEO is a set of strategies aimed at improving your company’s visibility in search results tied to a customer’s geographic location, as well as in online map services such as Google Maps or Bing Maps.

These mapping services and search engines don’t just provide “near me” queries with directions and travel times. They also display a wealth of valuable information about local businesses: office/store locations (including hotels, attractions, and infrastructure), real customer reviews (from those who have already used the product or service and left a rating), public transit routes, detailed contact information (phone numbers, hours of operation, official website, etc.), and even product ranges and pricing.

But what does split testing have to do with this? Let’s break it down for those new to the concept.

The Role of A/B Testing in Geo-Targeted SEO

Here’s what you need A/B testing for:

• Comparing and finding the best-performing business descriptions (business listings, website pages, etc.) for local positioning in search engines and map services.
• Identifying regional best practices. For businesses with a wide geographic reach, A/B testing helps tailor content for each region or city — delivering the true “personalized approach” everyone talks about but few actually implement.
• Reducing business risks. By testing hypotheses on a limited scale (e.g., 10% of your traffic), you can validate ideas before rolling them out widely.
• Gaining deeper audience insights to build more effective marketing campaigns. Ultimately, this translates into higher revenue and improved KPIs such as customer loyalty.

The key purpose of testing here is to improve local SEO based on real, validated data — not assumptions or guesswork.

Unique Challenges of Local SEO A/B Testing

Be aware:

1. Results depend on the user’s geographic location. If a marketer is working from an office in one city (say, the capital), they can’t directly see the search results their customers see in another city.
2. Search results may be influenced by the user’s own preferences and history. Personalization means each user can get slightly different results. For marketers, this creates major limitations in understanding the “what” and “how.”
3. Other factors can affect rankings, such as device type and the precision of geolocation (on smartphones, it may be accurate to within a few meters; on desktops, only to the city or district level).
4. Implementation risks. If A/B testing relies on redirects or JavaScript, mistakes can lead to duplicate pages, incorrect indexing, or even penalties for over-optimization.
5. Choosing the right metrics is critical. The test results will be misleading and unhelpful if your KPIs are misaligned.
6. Scaling complexity. The more offices or local markets you want to cover, the more data you need to analyze, and the more locations you need to simulate. This means massive volumes of traffic and data, high computing requirements, and complex proxy setups. Without specialized tools and services, it’s nearly impossible to manage.

How to Run SEO A/B Tests Across Locations

The simplest A/B testing workflow looks like this:

1. Clearly define the test goal and object. Be as precise as possible. For example, you might test landing pages optimized for local search queries, or specific on-page elements such as CTAs, unique selling propositions (USPs), ad copy, or business descriptions in online maps.
2. Determine benchmark metrics and KPIs that will drive decision-making. Examples include page traffic (unique visits) or the number of CTA clicks.
3. Set up redirects and connect an analytics system (or another tool capable of measuring your chosen metric). For instance, part of the audience is directed to a test version of a page, while the rest see the original.
4. Measure and compare results. Once metrics are collected, decide which version is more effective. For example, if the new version generates significantly higher CTA click-throughs, it makes sense to roll it out as the main page.

The longer the test runs, the more reliable and statistically valid the results will be.

That said, in many cases, you’ll need specialized tools and services. For example, when testing local search rankings of pages with different meta titles, content, schema markup, or even business listings in online maps (to compare various description formats).

Segmenting by City, Region, or Location Type

Proper segmentation is the foundation of effective local SEO A/B testing. Logical ways to segment include:

• By city — creating separate page versions for each city. This is the most effective option when queries and competition are tied to a specific locality.
• By region — for example, based on states, provinces, or other large territories with similar demand patterns, culture, or key characteristics.
• By location type — comparing large and small cities head-to-head is rarely meaningful. It makes sense to group metro areas, mid-sized cities, and small towns separately.
• By device type — segmenting based on whether users are searching on mobile or desktop can also provide valuable insights.

Key Metrics to Track in Local SEO Experiments

Which specific KPIs should you measure in SEO A/B tests? Here are the essentials:

• Search rankings for geo-dependent queries — track both baseline positions before testing and changes at the end, ideally monitoring movement throughout the test.
• CTR in local search results — snippet click-through rate, especially if you’re testing meta titles and descriptions with geo modifiers.
• Traffic from maps and directories (Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.) — measure both the share of total traffic and the absolute number of visits from business listings, ideally in dynamics.
• Number of calls and inquiries — tracked through UTM tags, call-tracking solutions, or end-to-end analytics systems.
• Offline conversions (e.g., store visits) — measurable via promo codes, special offers, or CRM integrations.
• Reviews and ratings in business profiles — while not always a direct result of the test, shifts in these indicators can strongly impact overall conversions.

How to Emulate Local Search Results at Scale

This is an area we not only understand but can also help with. Local search results are usually obtained through:

• Special parameters passed directly within the search query or configured at the user profile level. However, this approach doesn’t always work.
• Proxy servers with precise IP targeting. With this method, you can emulate location (down to a specific city) and device type (desktop vs mobile). This is by far the most effective and reliable approach.

What Are Proxies for SEO and Why Use Them

Technically, SEO proxies are regular proxies, but they are specifically tested for compatibility with search engines (SEO-related tasks). With them, you can safely send queries to search engines without worrying about blocks or penalties.

SEO proxies are most often used for:

• Geolocation emulation — choosing IP addresses from specific countries, regions, cities, and ISPs.
• Multithreading and large-scale scraping — sending hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous requests from different IP addresses without risking CAPTCHAs or bans.
• Accessing real local results — often, only through “clean” residential IPs (indistinguishable from those of real users) can you see accurate local search output.

Tools and Services for Search Emulation

Since Google, Bing, and other search engines don’t provide APIs for local search (or organic search in general), the only option is to rely on third-party tools and services.

If you’re looking for ready-made solutions, these include:

• Specialized cloud scrapers, such as Froxy SERP Scraper, where you can define targeting parameters and search queries and get structured data as output. Alternatives include proxy-based APIs like ScraperAPI or SerpAPI.
• Rotating SEO proxies. Ideally, choose those with feedback mechanisms to simplify integration with your scraping tools. This is the most universal option since proxies work with virtually any setup.

If existing cloud or stand-alone scrapers don’t fit your needs, you’ll need to develop your own, either from scratch or based on frameworks like Scrapy.

Advanced Local SEO Insights Through Testing

Here’s how A/B testing can take your local SEO to the next level.

The core principle: combining local SEO with A/B testing lets you make decisions not on guesses or assumptions, but on real metrics that reflect your local audience’s behavior:

Try it. Did it work? Keep it. Didn’t work? Test another variant. And this process can be repeated endlessly to continuously improve your local SEO.

What you can (and should) test in local SEO:

• Meta tags and page titles (H1—H3).
• CTA button colors and wording, UX design elements.
• Attention-grabbing images (as emotional reflections of content).
• Business profile descriptions (including in services like Google Business).
• Effectiveness of specific search queries (when buying traffic through search ads).
• Widgets and feedback forms (click-to-call, live chat, etc.).
• Mentions of local landmarks or neighborhoods (linked to your business, product, or service).
• Microdata schemas and page structure (especially for landing pages).
• Internal linking and backlinks (and their effect on rankings), plus reviews and testimonials (as trust signals).
• Search ads for geo-targeted queries and their wording.
  
  

Conclusion

Local SEO isn’t a new trend, but it’s one many still overlook. The main challenge in local and regional search optimization isn’t just technical SEO, it’s also regularly testing hypotheses. This is where split testing becomes a marketer’s and business’s best ally.

In some cases, you’ll need to analyze search results based on the IP location of a device. That’s when proxy services with precise geo-targeting, such as Froxy, come in handy.

And if you don’t want to build your own scraper, you can always use a ready-made solution with built-in geo-targeting features like Froxy SERP Scraper.