Search for a Topic, "Near Me"

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This has been around for some time, but has finally caught the eye of an industry journal: Search for a "... near me" and it is resulting in plenty of companies that have branded themselves exactly as needed. In fact, you don't even need to brand the business that way.

So did the clever SEO hack of a name actually help bump Thai Food Near Me above its nearby competitors in search results?

“I doubt it,” Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for Search, says. Owners doing this might find success, but Google pulls in other data to serve results to users, like location, reviews, or ratings — a “hodgepodge of different things that we have that are out there.”

[theverge.com...]