Increase “Near Me” Impressions by 52% Without Ever Using the Phrase “Near Me”

We also increased traffic by 800% but we’re not going to talk about that.

When we took over SEO for Hallman Asphalt we noticed a massive opportunity to improve rankings for their location city (Madison) but we also noticed that many people, when searching for driveway sealcoating, still use the term “near me.”

Never Use Near Me in Content

Never is a strong word, but we mean it. A lot of people would see the search volume around “near me” and want to pounce on it because like any other keyword, you’d think the more you use it in your content the better off you’d be. But that just isn’t true anymore. Thanks to algorithm updates like Bert, Google has a better understanding of what you actually mean when you search “near me.”

What To Do Instead?

So Hallman is a local business that cares about the community. They also happen to provide a service that changes based on weather conditions, which if you know Madison, WI, weather is weird.

So we took the opportunity to create some service-specific landing pages that provided care instructions for the Madison weather, as well as telling their customers what they do differently to ensure the weather isn’t a factor. We did this all while naturally mentioning cities they service.

So, if anyone asks how to improve local rankings (outside of Google Business Profile, which we’ll talk about later) we recommend that you naturally talk about the cities you service and provide genuinely helpful content for the people of those cities.

What Else Can We Do To Improve Local Rankings?

Always remember, be helpful to the area you serve and you’ll be rewarded with rankings. But on a more granular level, here are other ideas for content to create to help your local rankings:

1. Local content like ranking the best pizza places in your city (get them local backlinks too)
2. When writing about your products or services make sure you give information about how to care for those products or services in those cities, especially in cases with extreme weather
3. NEVER list cities, Google doesn’t need that and it sounds super weird, especially when doing Digital Marketing for Plainfield, Madison, Naperville, Joliet, Chicago, Aurora, and Romeoville (see how dumb that sounds?)
4. Location-based service landing pages can be a good idea in certain scenarios. Generally speaking, we recommend those types of pages if you take the services to them rather than them coming to you.
5. Ensure your target locations are in your title tags and meta descriptions on the pages that you want people to find when searching those cities. For example, let’s say you’re a car dealership selling Toyota’s in Naperville and you spam “Naperville Toyota Dealer” on every title tag on your page, that’s not best practice. When someone searches “new Toyota in Naperville” you want them to land on your new inventory page, so use that keyword and city on that one page instead of every page.

Local rankings are easier to get because of how smart search engines have become, but they are harder to maintain because of the amount of SERP features Google has created. (Maps, GBP, Local Pack, Reviews, etc.) If you want to know how you stack up locally feel free to reach out for a FREE local audit!