I recently had to audit a client\'s SEO performance across 15 different cities in 5 countries. Manually changing VPN locations was driving me insane.
So I wrote a Node.js script that uses headless Chrome to simulate searches from specific locations. The trick is overriding the navigator.geolocation API before the page loads:
javascript
const puppeteer = require(\'puppeteer\');
async function getLocalResults(query, lat, lng) {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
// Override geolocation
await page.setGeolocation({ latitude: lat, longitude: lng });
await page.goto(https://www.google.com/search?q=${encodeURIComponent(query)});
// Extract local pack results
const localResults = await page.evaluate(() => {
const items = document.querySelectorAll(\'.local-pack-item\');
return Array.from(items).map(item => item.innerText);
});
console.log(localResults);
await browser.close();
}
getLocalResults(\'pizza delivery\', 40.7128, -74.0060); // NYC
This worked, but maintaining it for multiple cities was a pain. I ended up switching to a service that does all this natively. Now I just pass a location and get clean, consistent results every time.
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