How to Optimize and Rank for “Near Me” Searches

Are you a business owner who offers products and services to customers in your neighborhood? Then it is important for you to have a clear understanding on how to rank for “Near Me” searches. It can help you to enhance the visibility of your business among customers in your local neighborhood. Along with that, you will receive all the support needed to increase your sales and profits.

When a person is looking for a business in the neighborhood, he will go to Google and search for the business by adding “Near Me”. For example, a person who is locked out of the home would search for “Locksmith Near Me”. Then he will be able to locate the best locksmith services available in the neighborhood, who can provide all the support and assistance needed with gaining access back to the home. The popularity of “Near Me” is increasing along with time as well. If you can take a look at Google Trends, you will be able to have a clear understanding about it. Hence, you should never miss out this opportunity. You need to learn how to rank your business for “Near Me” searches and get the maximum out of the opportunity.

How does “Near Me” searches function?

Before learning how to optimize your website for “Near Me” searches on search engines, you will need to have a clear understanding on how it would function. We are not fully clear about the search engine algorithms that search engines such as Google use. However, we are still in a position to come into solid conclusions based on what we can see. While keeping that in mind, we will share more details on how the “Near Me” searches would work.

Back in the day, it was quite easy for the business owners to dominate the “Near Me” search keywords. That’s because they just wanted to include “Near Me” phrase in their page titles and Meta information. Then they could immediately list the websites. However, things have changed significantly along with time. Numerous advancements are introduced to the search engine algorithms and now it is not so easy for you to get your website ranked on the top of “Near Me” searches. You will have to pay attention towards numerous factors. We will share more details about those factors later in this article.

Search engines locate your business based on the information you provide. In here, there are two important pieces of information that you will have to provide. The first thing out of them is to place your address on the business website. However, placing the business address just for the sake of it will not deliver positive results. You should structure the address properly as well. Then the crawlers of Google search engine will be able to locate the address accurately and provide you with the benefit of “Near Me” searches.

Another thing that you can do is to set up your Google My Business page. Every business owner should think about claiming the Google My Business Profile. It is one of the proven techniques available for you to dominate the local searches. We will share more information on how you can do it later in this article as well.

Google has officially announced that they pay attention to three important factors, which can outweigh the other factors.

Three prominent factors for local SEO to rank for “Near Me” searches

Distance

Google is capable of detecting the exact location of a search engine user through the IP address. Along with that, the Google search engine algorithm is capable of calculating the distance to available businesses, which match with search keyword. Based on the distance, the best business suggestions will be recommended to the search engine users. It is possible for a search engine user to clearly specify the location as well. For example, a person in Texas looking for a locksmith service can search for “locksmith Texas”. Then Google will provide recommendation of all the locksmith services based around Texas. Apart from this, a person can directly search for “locksmith near me” and Google will do the distance calculation to provide best recommendations accordingly.

Relevance

Relevance is the second most important factor behind the success of near me searches that are delivered by Google. Before providing the search results, Google will make sure that content you have on the website match perfectly well with the keywords that a user is searching for. However, this is quite tricky as well. For example, a person can use Google and search for “restaurant jobs near me”. In such a situation, your website might not be listed on the first search results, even if you have an open vacancy in your restaurant. That’s because you have not included relevant content on the restaurant website.

Prominence

Prominence varies on a variety of factors. They include business image, customer ratings and authority. Some of the brands are extremely popular among consumers. Even if the brand is prominent in the offline world, Google is intelligent enough to detect that. That’s why you can often see how prominent brands are listed on the top of search engine results at all times. If your brand is not so popular, you don’t need to worry too much. That’s because you just need to focus on increasing your review count. Then you will be able to get all the support needed to secure a higher ranking on Google. Along with that higher ranking, you will be able to make your brand popular as well.

It is also important to keep in mind that prominence is established based on the information that is available on internet about your business. Hence, you should try to create lots of information about your business on the internet. For example, you can think about writing more blog posts about your business on the internet. Then you will be able to receive all the support that you need to secure better rankings on the search engine results.

Why do you need to worry about “Near Me” searches?

As a business owner, it is important for you to think about optimizing the business website for “Near Me” searches. This can create a direct impact behind the ability that you have to attract and retain new customers for the business.

According to a recent study conducted by Forbes, it has been identified that around 95% of the smartphone owners have initiated local searches. This includes the prospects of your business as well. You need to make sure that your business is visible to them, so that you can get them to spend their money and purchase what your business is offering.

From another search, it was discovered that around 61% of the customers are visiting the websites of businesses before they visit. This will also help you with securing a higher number of customers with ease. People who see your business via Google search results will directly call you as well. Then it I up to you to deliver an appropriate experience to the prospects and transform them into revenue generating customers of your business.

And people have continued to adapt to advances in search technology. If you want a crystal clear example of purchase intent, “near me” mobile searches that contain a variant of “can I buy” or “to buy” have grown over 500% over the last two years. These include things like “where can I buy stamps near me,” “places to buy scrubs near me,” or “where to buy vinyl records near me.” *

How to optimize your business website for “Near Me” searches

Now let’s come to the most important section of the article, where we explain the steps that you must follow in order to optimize your website for “Near Me” searches. We believe that every person who wants to secure the best returns with Google and other search engines will be able to follow these steps and get maximum returns, All you have to do is to keep these steps in your mind and follow them accordingly.

1. Claim your Google My Business page and optimize it

The very first thing you have to do is to go ahead and claim your Google My Business page. Then you should focus on optimizing it accordingly. We believe this as the most important factor, which can contribute towards the boost that you can receive with “Near Me” searches.

Assume that you have a Chinese restaurant. When a person searches for “Chinese restaurants near me” from your neighborhood, you expect to show your website at the top of search engine results. You can do this easily by claiming the Google My Business page and properly optimizing it.

If you don’t have a GMB profile, you can go through some simple steps and open it. Following steps will be able to assist you with.

• Search for Google My Business on the internet and visit the first URL.
• Click on the Start Now Button.
• Now you should enter your business name as well as business address.
• You should use Google Maps and add directions to your business.
• Next, you must add the business hours. You must also add other related information to your business, such as the business website and business phone number.
• Make sure that you select the correct category for your business from the list.
• Add the photos that define your business.

Now you are done with creating your Google My Business profile. Hence, you should go ahead and ask people to leave reviews about your business on the internet. This will contribute a lot towards the success that you can secure.

You must also ensure that the NAP details are correctly listed on the GMB profile and they remain consistent across all the channels. NAP refers to Name, Address and Phone Number of your business. NAP that you include in the business website should be consistent with NAP that you have on your official website. It should be the same in all your social media channels as well. Such a consistent NAP arrangement can deliver maximum returns to you with securing better rankings on Google.

Along with NAP, it is a good idea to ensure that other important business information remains accurate at all times. If you relocate to a new address, you will have to change them accordingly across all the online channels. You must also ensure that your business information are comprehensive at all times.

While creating your Google My Business profile, you will also come across the need to add some unique attributes related to the business, such as your business offerings. For example, if you are offering free Wi-Fi to the customers, you will come across the need to highlight it over the business website. You can do it through your Google My Business profile as well. Just take a look at the following image, which clearly shows how a hotel has indicated the amenities that it offers. If you can include such amenities, you can deliver all the important information to visitors who are looking forward to book your website.

2. Apply appropriate schema markups

Any business owner who wants to dominate “Near Me” should think about using an appropriate schema markup as well. Schema markup can be considered as one of the best opportunities available for you to make your business stand out from the businesses of competitors. Therefore, you can easily attract more customers from your local neighborhood, instead of allowing them to go ahead with your competitor businesses.

All the search engines such as Google will be using schema data in order to gather more information about your business. Therefore, you should never underestimate the importance of proper schema markup. You should use them appropriately and you will get the chance to display all those details in the rich snippets of Google search engine results pages.

For example, a properly used schema markup will be able to help you with displaying your business opening hours on Google search engine results pages. A customer doesn’t need to come to your website to know about the opening hours of your business. That’s because any person can see your opening hours on the search engine results page itself. Take a look at the way how opening hours of the following business have been indicted properly on the search engines.

Assume that your business is present in more than one location. Then you should be having dedicated pages on the website for each and every location. You must ensure that you are including a schema markup to each and every location page of your website as well. Moreover, you should be including the operational hours, business added and contact information for each and every location as well.

On top of that, you can go ahead and include the homepage schema markup as well. Then you can easily allow the business to be visible within Knowledge Graph. This can provide a great overall assistance to you with ensuring the accuracy of business information.

3. Create backlinks with geographic anchor texts

As you already know, backlinks are in a position to contribute a lot towards the search engine rankings that you can secure. There are many different types of backlinks that you can create. If you can create backlinks by having your business geographic anchor text, you will be able to receive a great helping hand with dominating the “Near Me” searches. Hence, we encourage you to take a look at it and build more backlinks by including appropriate anchor text.

Always ensure that you are creating backlinks from the high authority websites and blogs on the internet. You must also pick relevant websites on the internet as well. For example, if you are planning to create a backlink for a restaurant, you shouldn’t pick a blog that offers content with related to life insurance. You need to ensure that the blog has relevant content as to your business.

As a restaurant what wants to get the most out of ‘Near Me” searches, you can pick a blog or website related to food. Then you can create a backlink by using an anchor text such as “best restaurant in Austin”. Some other anchor text ideas that you can use include “Austin Chinese restaurant”, “Austin downtown restaurant”, “burgers in Austin” etc. Likewise, you must always include the demographics of your business when creating the anchor text. Then you can get those backlinks to deliver lots of value to your business.

4. Get a mobile responsive design

Developing a mobile responsive website is a must in today’s world. If your business website is not yet mobile responsive, you are missing out a large number of opportunities. More than 50% of your prospects are using their mobile devices in order to search for businesses like yours on the internet. If your business website is not a mobile responsive one, Google will not recommend it to the people who use search engines. That’s because Google cares a lot about delivering the best user experience to the people who use the search engine.

You can get the assistance of a reputed web design company and make your business website mobile responsive. Then you can receive all the support needed to deliver a quality experience to the visitors. Along with that, you can get the support needed to secure a better ranking on the “Near Me” searches as well.

When you make the business website mobile responsive, you will be delivering an excellent experience to all the visitors, regardless of the device that they use to access your website. Moreover, you can think about improving the page loading speeds as well. It will also contribute heavily towards the rankings that you can secure.

You will come across the need to share important information about your business along with the visitors. This is where you can get the most out of search bar. You must configure the search bar, so that any person who wants to locate information can easily do it. On top of that, you must minify HTML, JavaScript and CSS used in the website. They can deliver a helping hand to you with improving the overall loading speeds of the website.

Another great thing that you can do along with improving the mobile responsiveness of your website is to reduce the total number of redirects. Along with that, you must block JavaScript that offers render blocking on the website.

It is a good idea to refrain from using Flash in your website as much as possible. You don’t have to stick to Flash to create a good looking website. There are numerous alterative technologies, which you can use and get even better results.

Another proven technique available for you to increase the loading speed of your website is to seek the assistance of a CDN. If you ae planning to attract customers in different parts of the world, a CDN will be able to deliver the best assistance. That’s because it will help you with distributing the overall load, so that you can make the website load faster by connecting visitors to the closest servers to their location.

4. Website On-page optimization for geo local searches

On-page optimization can also contribute heavily towards the rankings that you can secure on “near me” searches. On top of that, on page optimization can boost the returns that you can experience with local SEO as well.

Once you discover the best keywords through your initial keyword research, you can go ahead and start writing down a list of keywords, which you will have to focus on. Let’s take our classic example for a locksmith company in Chicago. You will be able to use “locksmith service near me” as the page title for one of your pages. Then you will be able to include “near me” into the title tags of all different location pages, alt tags and anchor texts that you have. While doing this, you will be sending out a strong signal to the search engines to rank your website. In other words, you can see how your search engines boost along with this.

While you are following this step, you should be mindful about keyword stuffing as well. If you get caught for keyword stuffing, you cannot get any positive returns. Therefore, it is important to include your keywords in the natural form as much as possible. This can deliver the support that you need with boosting the rankings on search engine results.

You will also be able to create local content within the blog. This will help you with on-page optimization. All you have to do is to focus on the keywords when writing these blogs.

Once you optimize the existing website, you can easily get the support needed to boost the rankings that you are securing on the search engines. Along with this, you can focus on networking with the other local businesses, which don’t compete with you. You can get backlinks from them. These backlink building campaigns can benefit both entities.

The focus of your business should not just be on the local customer base. Always keep in mind that people who come from other parts of the world are also looking for the products and services that you are offering. For example, a person who is visiting your area would be interested in getting to know about the products and services that are available in the area. Hence, you should think about making your business visible to them as well.

5. Develop new pages targeting each and every location of the business

You should be creating pages, which target each and every location of your business. For example, assume that you are offering locksmith services in five different cities located across United States, including Austin, Boston, Washington, San Francisco and Chicago. Then you need to ensure that you have created a new page for each and every location out of these.

Creating the location specific pages is not enough. You must also ensure that you are optimizing each and every location specific page for the “near me” searches. There are some useful strategies available for you to follow while trying to get that job done as well.

The very first thing you have to do is to use appropriate URLs for the location specific pages. For example, URL of the page that you create to highlight the locksmith services that you offer in Chicago should be as www.yourwebsite.com/chicago-locksmith. Such a URL structure will be able to help you with improving your “Near Me” search engine rankings with ease.

Similar to optimizing the URL, you must also optimize the Meta Information. You must include appropriate information in the Meta Title and Meta Description.

You must be including some images in the location specific pages. These images must be optimized with location specific information as well. In other words, you should change the alt tags of the images that you have on the location specific pages and make sure that you include your location in all of them. You should be mindful to include location in the title tags as well as alt tags of the image to end up with securing best returns.

You should include a suitable description about your business on the location specific pages. Then you must include all the other important information that people would love to see. For example, you can include store directions, menu and store hours. If you are offering any special amenities, you must be including information related to them as well.

It is even better if you can invest your money to come up with a video of the store and include it. Make sure that you create videos like that to each and every store of your business. Along with the video, you should include a video transcription as well. This will help you with enhancing the relevancy of your website. As a result, you can dominate the search engine results with ease.

Internal linking among pages must never be ignored. However, we encourage you to use your common sense while you are creating all the internal links. It is possible for you to link the different location specific web pages. However, you should include appropriate anchor texts with location specific data in them.

6. Publish quality contents to attract local links

Gathering local links is something that you can easily do with a blog. Hence, we encourage you to go ahead and do it as well. You don’t need to have any special skills or knowledge to create a blog and maintain it. The efforts you spend on a blog are totally worth as it can deliver all the support you need with acquiring local links.

You can come up with articles and share them over the blog on a regular basis. Then you can allow the visitors to subscribe to the blog. People who are interested in staying up to date with your business will go ahead and subscribe to your blog without thinking twice.

A blog can be considered as one of the best methods available for you to secure local links. On top of that, content you share over the blog can be used to tempt the visitors to purchase what you are offering as well. In other words, it can help you to push the customers who are interested in buying what you offer into the next step with ease.

In order to make the blog even more interesting, you may get the assistance of local influencers. You can pick some local influencers, and then invite them to write related content to your niche. The power of influencers will add more value to the blog.

You may also conduct surveys locally and then publish the findings out of them on the blog. This will create an ideal environment for you to go ahead and secure getting an authority backlink with ease. In case if you are having informative list containing queries, which includes the questions that people have and the answers to them, you will be able to create a blog post for each and every question. You need to answer the specific question and deliver direct answers to the visitors.

7. Be active on search media marketing

Social media marketing campaigns that you run are capable of creating a direct impact on the results that you can secure with the “Near Me” searches. Hence, we encourage you not to ignore this fact. Most of the business owners believe that social media networks are not in a position to create a strong impact on SEO. This fact is false. Social media networks can deliver the best possible assistance that you can ever receive with dominating your rankings on leading search engines.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all the other leading social media networks are in a position to create a similar impact. Hence, you should provide equal efforts to promoting your business in all these social media networks. You must include business specific information on all the different social media channels. They include your company name, company address and the opening hours of the business. On top of that, you can share up to date information about products and services that you are offering through the business as well.

Social media networks are an excellent channel available for you to engage with your prospects and existing customers. That’s because you can use the features available in social media to get into engaging conversations along with the visitors.

If you have multiple outlets, you can think about using social media networks to create local content, which can deliver signals to the search engines with listing your business accordingly.

You must always keep in mind that local content that you use is community oriented. It is possible for you to get involved along with the community events. These community events will be able to assist you with creating links along with other businesses in the community as well. Then you will be able to include press releases, blog posts and articles about the experiences that you could secure by taking part in the local events.

8. Keep on getting reviews as much as possible

Positive reviews about your business on the internet will be used as an indication by search engines such as Google to determine the rankings. This is why your business should think about collecting positive reviews as much as you can.

Google has done everything to make the life easy for your customers to go ahead and leave a review about your business. You should be taking the maximum advantage out of this. A customer who wants to review your business can simply do it from Google Maps. In here, the customer can locate your business on Google Maps and then click on the button called “Write a Review”. Any person can do it from web as well as from the Google Maps mobile app.

At the time of leaving the review, your customers will be able to include a star rating. This star rating is directly associated with the quality of the business. You should always keep in mind that Google is looking to deliver the best possible experience with these reviews as well. This is the reason behind why businesses with a better star rating gets ranked above the businesses that have a lower star rating.

You cannot force your customers to leave a better star rating to you on the internet. You will have to provide an appropriate service to the customers and tempt them to leave a five star rating. If your products or services are delivered in an excellent way to the customers along with a superior experience, you will never come across any struggles with securing a better star rating.

It is possible for you to ask the customers of your business to leave positive reviews on your website as well. The search engine crawlers of Google are capable of picking up all those positive reviews that you have on the business website.

When you have a decent number of positive reviews collected under the business, you can easily improve the chances that you have to secure a better ranking on Google. You will be able to see your business URL on the top search engine results pages at all times.

• Include neighborhood names and landmarks on your website

You must think about including neighborhood names and landmarks on your website as they are related to the location. The relevancy you create with this will be able to deliver all the support that you need with securing “Near Me” searches.

Including neighborhood names and landmarks on the website will assist you with telling Google where exactly your business is located. Therefore, you should do a bit of a research and locate the prominent neighborhood names and landmarks that exist around your business. You can include them directly in the business website. Or else, you can write blog articles related to them.

For example, assume that you are offering the locksmith services in Manhattan. Then you should include in the website that you are capable of catering to the needs of customers who come from Harboro, Springfield and all the other neighborhoods. Then people who search for your business from those locations will also be able to get to know about your business through search engines.

Along with this, we encourage you to include driving directions to the business through your website. These driving directions will be captured by the search engine bots as well. Best place to include driving directions is the Contact Us page of your business. You can include driving directions from some of the major landmarks located in your area.

Final Words on How to Rank for “Near Me” Searches

Now you are aware about all the steps that you must follow in order to rank your website for “near me” search queries. No matter what kind of a business you have, these steps can deliver positive returns. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to take a look at these steps and go ahead with getting the maximum out of them accordingly. Then you will be able to receive an excellent support with dominating your search engines as well. You will appreciate all the amazing returns that “near me” search queries can deliver to your business.

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