How to SEO for "near me"

How can we SEO for terms "near me" for e.g. "lawyers near me" or "stores near me" etc.

Because we can't determine user location unless he visits our page so when user is searching on Google, how do we target these keywords? Shall we create a lot of pages with city names for e.g. /lawyers-in-austin, /lawyers-in-newyork etc. and hope that Google will do its magic and show user result based on his location!?

aliweb said:

Shall we create a lot of pages with city names for e.g. /lawyers-in-austin, /lawyers-in-newyork etc. and hope that Google will do its magic and show user result based on his location!?

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This is a good but generally harsh option for these reasons:

Firstly, data from "near me" from most tools is biased for this reason. You will see under the SERP, some little tips that will suggest you where the location of the crawler was when scraping Google results.

Problem with this approach is by far, content. Very difficult to create quality content when you need to target such an amount of "near me", specially if you are looking to rank nation-wide. If you client is local, then you could do a whole local SEO strategy which include such, but when you need to focus on a ton of cities, things could be really complex specially content´-wise as I said.

aliweb said:

How can we SEO for terms "near me" for e.g. "lawyers near me" or "stores near me" etc.

Because we can't determine user location unless he visits our page so when user is searching on Google, how do we target these keywords? Shall we create a lot of pages with city names for e.g. /lawyers-in-austin, /lawyers-in-newyork etc. and hope that Google will do its magic and show user result based on his location!?

Click to expand...

You have to run google ads of these stores or lawyer services also on the facebook. For More reach you have to make a website according to their services.

Submit your website in a few local directories and make a Google website with your location.

near me is a difficult keyword, not like a regular keyword, as this is a question of proximity, so:

- if it has anything in common with regular keywords, you can just target "near me" as a regular keyword (it may help),
- other than that, rank for your locations, and ultimately you will rank for near me for IP addresses nearby.

say you are in Dallas, TX; rank first for "Dallas+keyword" before worrying about near me.

Firstly, your concern related to the keyword "near me" is that "near me" is not a keyword but a term that is used by consumers as a result Google shows them location-specific results.
If a kid searches for "ice cream near me" sitting in Los Angeles. The result he will be shown wouldn't be using the keyword "near-me". Instead, all of them ( ice-cream shops) would optimize their content using the location name which is "Los Angeles".
So it could be for instance " xyz ice-cream Los Angeles" mentioned in any of their blogs or etc.

Secondly, your approach to creating specific pages for different locations is correct. If the client has enough resources, you should kick the content strategy right away.
Start publishing separate pages for different locations it will be easy for implementing PPC campaigns as well.