Local SEO in Korea runs on Naver Map — and your rank changes every 500 meters

If you do local SEO for businesses in Korea, Google Maps is not where the fight happens. Koreans look for cafés, restaurants, salons and academies on Naver Map (Naver Place), and the order of that list decides who gets the visit.

Agencies here track that order every day — usually by opening the Naver app on one phone, at one desk, and counting.

The catch: Naver ranks places by relevance and by distance from the person searching. A rank checked from the office is the rank for the office.

So I measured how much it actually moves.

The experiment: 25 searches, 500 m apart

Keyword: 카페 (café). A 5×5 grid of search points, 500 m apart, centred on Gangnam Station in Seoul — about 2 km × 2 km. At each point I pulled Naver Place's top 100 and looked up two cafés near the station.

• Café A is #1 at Gangnam Station. It is in the top 3 at only 5 of the 25 points (20%), and not in the top 100 at all at 9 of them. It still has the best average rank of every café on the grid — the whole top of the list reshuffles as you move.
• Café B is not in the top 100 at the station — but #1 just 500 m north, and #2–#3 in the north-west corner. Checked from the station, you would report "we don't rank". Checked from the north exit, "we're #1". Both are true.

Two neighbouring cafés, the same keyword, and completely different "territories".

One gotcha: keywords with a place name

If the keyword itself names an area — 강남역 카페 ("Gangnam Station café"), 압구정 영어학원 — Naver anchors results to that area. In my tests every grid point then returned the same rank. The geo-grid only tells you something for keywords without a place name (카페, 헤어샵, 영어학원), which is exactly how people search on their phone when they are already nearby.

How the check works

Naver's mobile place list accepts the searcher's coordinates and returns the top 100 places for a keyword, with IDs, categories, review counts and the separate paid-ad slots. So a rank check is one plain HTTP request per keyword per point — no browser, no login. A 5×5 grid is 25 requests and the whole run finishes in under a minute.

I wrapped it into an Apify Actor so it can be scheduled and shared: Naver Place Rank Tracker.

• Many keywords × many places per run (your business + competitors), by place ID, URL or name
• Any location, or a 3×3 / 5×5 / 7×7 geo-grid around it
• Organic rank and ad slot reported separately, plus the top competitors at each point
• A summary (average rank, best/worst, % of points in the top 3/10/20) and an HTML heat-map report like the one above, generated on every run

{
    "keywords": ["카페"],
    "targetPlaces": ["https://m.place.naver.com/place/123456789"],
    "locations": ["Gangnam Station=37.4979,127.0276"],
    "gridSize": 5,
    "gridSpacingMeters": 500
}

Pricing is per search (one keyword at one point): $0.003. The 5×5 grid above cost $0.075. Checking 10 keywords from one location every weekday is about $0.66 a month.

What I'd do with it

• Stop reporting a single number. "#1" means nothing without "where". Report the share of the neighbourhood where you are top 3.
• Aim ad and offline spend at the gaps. The grey cells are where the organic list does not show you — that is where a Naver Place ad, a flyer or a local blog review campaign has room to work.
• Measure changes over the whole area. Run the same grid weekly and compare the share of top-3 cells, not the rank from your desk.

If you work on Korean local search, I'd love to hear what else you would want in the output.