The Near Me Keyword and the Power It Has for Local Rankings

The shift of mobile consumption as consumer adoption grew has gone from 2007 up to today. The general public of all ages have gone through this major shift in the way they buy things and search for goods on mobile devices.

You can see it each day as more and more consumers are speaking into their phones for questions and getting answers from Siri or Cortana, and now OpenAi’s ChatGPT bot.

What’s different on desktop / laptop Google searches is that these new types of “conversational” searches is a whole new opportunity for companies to unlock an SEO Strategy first.

Incorporate “Near Me” to SEO Content

As more and more people turn to their smartphones as their “personal assistants”, numerous opportunities arise for companies looking to gain a slice of the “near me” search. Websites looking to gain more visibility online and to rank higher within mobile devices, on Google and Apple Maps, and desktop searches will need to use a hybrid of Local SEO Services to rank for these coveted searches.

PICTURE THIS RIGHT NOW

You are visiting a new city.

Let’s say it’s West Palm Beach, FL.

You are excited because you’ve never been to West Palm Beach but you’ve heard they have some of the best Sushi restaurants in South Florida.

You are hungry and you desire the closest Sushi restaurant near you.

You whip out your smartphone and ask SIRI to do a Google Search for:

Sushi Restaurants Near Me

If you are a sushi restaurant within that vicinity, a good way to increase the chances of being found on Google and Google Maps include:

  • Use physical directions in your copywriting (located nearby the stadium, a short 3 minute walk from the train station or an Omakase bar on the 300 block of Clematis Street)
  • Use keyword + near me in Title Tags – Meta Data
  • Add Schema code to add longitude and latitude coordinates as well as SameAs to strengthen your entity within Google

The word “Sushi Restaurants Near Me” has become a popular keyword as more and more people started to use these types of hyper local terms. Check out Google Trends for more info.

The SEO keyword phrase “Near Me” can be used as an indicator that informs Google and other search engines to let a mobile searcher know your business is located near their search.

The way the Google search engine algorithm has evolved over the last few years to incorporate mobile devices is evident in their goal to return search engine result pages (SERPs) that are now answering questions, that include specific information about a question but also have a conversational tone.

The use of long tail phrases through your content marketing is a great way to increase the number of organic keywords your website ranks for.  The use of “Near Me” and other geo-specific keywords is a great approach to helping your website rank for local keywords.

  • 51 percent of smartphone users discover new companies or products when searching on their smartphones
  • 91 percent of consumers grab their mobile in the middle of a task for inspiration
  • Since 2011, “near me” searches have increased 34 times at a rate of 146 percent year-over-year, and 88 percent of those are conducted on mobile

5 Ways to Use “Near Me” in SEO

  1. Optimize your images for the city, zip code, county, and state that your business is in. Think about naming your image file your service + near me. In the past, we’ve included near me as part of the description for a Google Business Profile (GBP) along with zip codes helped gain visibility in their local market. Adding images with near me in the file name and the description helped give a boost.
  2. Multi location franchise could effectively purchase an industry related “NearMe dot com” exact match domain (EMD) for the sole purpose of capturing more online coverage for that industry. This clustering helps build authority to your website, earns you a nice backlink to your site, and defensively protects you from a competitor about using this Near Me tactic. We’ve deployed a site for the wholesale building materials industry that has been used to test this tactic and has allowed the brand to knock their competitors off of several important keyword rankings in various cities.
  3. Blog content educates your prospective customers but Google and other search engines. Content marketing allows Google to crawl your web pages, so helping it to understand nearby, close to, points of interests, and other related location keywords will drive more local searches to your website.
  4. Creating a YouTube video and distributing it on your social media platforms will give a boost to the URL you are targeting. Using hashtags in the description and near me towards the beginning of the title will give you an advantage. Making sure you can get views will ensure will help to rank. Adding this video with schema markup language on a dedicated web page will fuel growth as well.
  5. Use the H2 header with “Near Me” if you want a better chance to rank for it. Depending on how popular the “Near Me” search is and where you live in the USA; you could capture not just valuable keywords positions locally but from our experience you can rank in other cities and states.

Should You Use “Near Me”?

Using descriptive copywriting will help boost ranking locally but most companies shouldn’t keyword stuff their sites with Near Me – It could end up backfiring so always test things on your own. Using the tips above will give you more visibility into near me searches in your city or town.

We are currently building our 3rd site for an industry + near me for a brand of medical centers throughout Florida. We will update this article in the future when we receive more data inputs from our experience.