Local Searches or
What people are doing, how they used search to do it and why it should matter to you…
“Near Me” searches in both the desktop and mobile environments are on the rise. According to Google*, “near me” searches are up over 500% over the past 2 years.
It’s no secret that people are learning better techniques on how to find what they want on the internet. One of those best practices is the term “near me”. Almost invariably Google knows where you are and they apply the term “near me” to your location, it’s as simple as that.
When asked, Google’s John Mueller has said including the words “near me” in your title do not help your SEO placement:
So as far as I know, we mostly look at this with regards to location, so doing things like adding “pizzeria near me” as a title of your pages on your website probably doesn’t make that much sense because we would try to figure out like what is actually near the user.
However we think that there are some tips you can use to optimize for the near me searches.
- Make sure your website is mobile friendly (this one is obvious)
- Use geographical longtail keywords in your text, for example: “we are located near downtown Boston” or “we are close to the intersection of 5th Street and Main Avenue in Sacramento”.
- Use City and State in your titles
- Always make sure your physical address is on every page of your website, including zip code
- Use alt description tags in your images, especially with location images
Finally, be sure that your business has a proper listing on Google Business.
here are some tips you can use to optimize for the near me searches. Click To Tweet* Source: Google Data, U.S., April 2015–March 2016 vs. April 2017–March 2018.