Searches including the phrase ‘near me’ are continuing to grow, and some businesses are tapping into this by using these words in their brand name.
A recent ‘Think with Google’ article states that optimising for ‘near me’ searches on your website can be a great way to increase rankings and also improve the quality of traffic to your website.
Bill Ready, president of commerce, payments and next billion users at Google, wrote a guide called ‘2022 Retail Marketing Guide: Drive foot traffic and in-store sales’. This included an important statistic indicating that local searches are continually growing, with searchers looking for more local businesses to support instead of large chains.
According to the guide, ‘open now near me’ searches are currently up 400%, which really shows that local search is continuing to grow and is becoming more important for businesses to optimise for on their websites.
By looking at Google Trends, you can see since January 2014 that there has been a large increase in “near me” searches in the UK. This shows its importance in search engine optimisation (SEO) and getting your business in front of customers in your local area. This increase is depicted below:
There are a few other keywords similar to ‘near me’ that are also good to optimise for. Writing for Search Engine Land, Chris Silver Smith suggests the following:
• “around here”
• “nearby”
• “close by”
• “close to me”
• “local”
If you want to grow your business by getting more quality traffic to your website, we offer SEO services to businesses who want to grow their brand and get in front of their target audience. To find out more, get in touch with our friendly team today to see how we can help your grow your business using digital marketing.
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