Does “near me” help your website rank better?

Many people include the words “near me” when performing local searches on Google, such as searching for something like “car dealer near me”.

Google understands this, and essentially extracts “near me” and just runs it as a local search, which makes sense. However, if Google treats it that way, does it make sense to include the words “near me” on your website? The answer is a very clear… maybe.

The Poll

A recent poll on Twitter asked experts if they thought the words “near me” on a website would have a positive impact, and 30% said “no”. However, 20% said “yes” and another 22% said “it depends”, so it wasn’t super clear in any one direction.

Joy Hawkins did a bit more research into this, and found that it indeed could help in some cases. I’m not sure this will last very long, as Google is likely counting it less and less as time goes on, but it could be of value for now.

Is your business “near me”?

This can be taken a step further in a few ways. First, as Joy shared, we’re seeing more businesses include “near me” in the title of their pages. This seems like a pretty safe move — it probably helps a little for now, and can easily be removed later.

However, there was also an example shared of a dentist office whose actual name is “Dentist Near Me”.