Is Your Local Business Attracting Enough People From ‘near Me’ Searches?

Posted by Liz Seyi on March 11th, 2020

As we all know, there are certain times in life when just two words can make a huge difference. When it comes to bolstering your Local Business Digital Marketing, there are certainly two words that come to our minds here at PENNInk Productions. And those words are... ‘near me’.

What is a ‘near me’ search?

It’ll probably be obvious information to you if you’ve performed such a search before, but a ‘near me’ search is a location-based search query. But there’s more to it than that: you’ll typically perform such a search if you are both ready and able to buy a particular product or service.

After all, Google treats the words ‘near me’ as more than just any old two words, by using the present location of the searcher to ensure it delivers results that really are locally relevant to them.

So, whether your business is trying to appeal to someone searching for ‘Chinese food near me’, ‘oil change near me’ or ‘escape room near me’ – to name just some of the possibilities – it’s important that your organisation takes ‘near me’ searches seriously. After all, they could be key to putting you in touch with the local people who’re actually likely to purchase from you.

So, what can you do to improve your results from such searches?

There’s a lot that you can do to bolster your chances of getting more hits, sales and revenue from ‘near me’ searches, including:

1. Updating your listing on Google My Business so that it is as complete and informative as possible

2. Optimising your business website to be more mobile-friendly, as is becoming more important due to Google’s mobile-first indexing strategy

3. Creating a different landing page for each location of your business – for example, if your business is a restaurant chain

4. Making your menu or pricing information available in plain text, and not just image or PDF form, so that Google can index these details and human users dependent on assistive technology – such as screen readers – can actually read them

5. Encouraging customers to leave reviews of your business on Google, as these will be prominent to those who perform ‘near me’ searches and compare your firm to local alternatives

While the above tips are naturally not all of the steps that you could conceivably take to build your firm’s local presence on Google and appeal more directly to potential customers who are actually based nearby, they could certainly help you to get off to the best possible start in doing this.

Why not give PENNInk Productions’ own Local Business Digital Marketing professionals a call now, on 020 8144 7931, to learn more about how we can work closely with you to make your brand more impactful on the web?