If you are doing your own SEO, or if you have hired an agency to do it, you will want to make sure that you or they are optimizing your site for a new”er” way that people are looking for your practice online.

“Near Me” searches are on the rise – big time, and if you are not ranking for these types of searches, then you could be missing out on potential new patients. Take a look at this Google Trends graph, that shows the increase in searches in the past 3 years for the term “dentist near me”.

So how do you optimize for this terms like this? Dan Leibon did some recent research on this topic and offers some great advice on some of the specific ranking factors for this type of search:

Having a good amount of Google reviews and having local intent in your backlink anchor text are the clear winners here. However it is important to note that these aren’t magic bullets to rank for these terms, but they will certainly help.

What also is interesting is that your practice’s proximity is not necessarily a prominent ranking factor for these searches, see the screenshot below, you will see that on my search Bright Now ranks 2nd above practices that are closer to me: