If you’re running a regional business and you want to reach people in your surrounding area, then you need to practice good local search SEO.Part of that effort involves ranking when people search for “near me.”
In this article, I’ll go over several local search SEO strategies that can land you a top spot for “near me” searches.
The Rise of “Near Me” Searches
In the past two years, “Near me” searches have witnessed exponential growth, as highlighted in the stats below:
There has been 150% growth for phrases like “near me now”. For example “Pizza near me now”.
There has been a 900% growth for phrases like “near me tonight/today”. For example “clubs near me tonight”.
There has been 200% growth for phrases like “now” + “near me”. For example “stores open near me now”.
Top ‘Near Me’ Query Categories
A survey conducted by Uberall tracked the responses of 1,000 smartphone owners and found around 82% of smartphone users had conducted a “near me” search between July 23 and July 27, 2018.
The hierarchy of the categories are given below:
Food: 84%
Entertainment: 56%
Banking: 50%
Apparel: 41%
Persona care: 38%
How Do You Optimize For “Near Me” Searches?
- List your business on Google My Business and optimize it.
In order to get your business to the top of “near me” searches, you need to rank your business on local business results’ pages - Use proper schema markup. Schema markup is a great way to help your business stand out from competitors in the local search results. Schema data helps search engines acquire more information related to your business and present them in the form of rich snippets, which are immensely helpful for the user
- Acquire backlinks having geographic anchor text : Backlinks work well to improve your business rankings on Google local. In order to increase your business rankings for “near me” searches, you need to acquire high authority/relevant backlinks with geographically-rich anchor text.
- Create pages targeting every location of your business, and optimize them. If your business serves several locations then you need to create different pages for different locations. For example, if your bakery business serves five different U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Boston, and Austin, then you need to create five different web pages serving each of these different cities.
- Make your site mobile-friendly – Google prefers to return those sites in the search results that offer the best experience to the user. Making your site mobile-friendly and improving your overall site speed are some of the best ways to improve your site experience for users and rank higher for “near me” searches.