What 1,250 'near me' searches taught us about local SEO

We went through the Search Console exports for five sites we work on, April 2025 to August 2026, and pulled out every search that contained "near me". A pain clinic, a roofer, a tint shop, a game shop and a marketing agency.

There were 1,250 of them. 780 showed one of those sites on page one, 191 in the top three. Between them they brought in 343 clicks.

The numbers, site by site

Near me is hundreds of small searches

Nobody ranks for "near me". People type fascia release near me, pokemon cards near me, window tinting near me, roof repair near me open saturday, and Google treats each one as its own search.

The clinic alone shows up for 415 different versions. They brought in 179 clicks between them. No single phrase carried it, which is the normal shape of local search. If you're tracking one near-me keyword in a rank tracker, you're watching a tiny slice of what's happening.

Businesses people visit win most of them

The clinic and the game shop account for 836 of the 1,250 queries. Customers go to both. The roofer and the agency go to the customer, and between them they have 208.

That fits how Google handles these searches. "Near me" leans hard on where the person searching is standing, and a business with a storefront has an address to measure from. A roofer runs as a service-area business, usually with the address hidden, so Google has less to go on and leans more on the website and the Business Profile's service areas.

If you're a contractor, this is why your town pages and your Business Profile setup matter more than they do for a shop. You have to tell Google where you work, page by page.

Page one isn't the same as clicks

780 queries on page one produced 343 clicks. A lot of near-me searches are answered by the map pack before anyone scrolls to the regular results, so an organic page-one ranking often sits under three map listings, an ad block and a "people also ask" box.

The tint shop is a good example. Its name ranks at position 2 or better in every form, but window tinting near me sits at 19. That one search is decided by the map, so the fix is the Business Profile and reviews, not more website copy.

What the ones in the top three have in common

The two sites with the most top-three near-me rankings, the clinic and the game shop, have a few things in common:

• The town is on the page. In the title, in a heading, and in the text, in normal sentences.
• There's a page for the specific service. The game shop's custom woodwork has its own page, and it pulls its own traffic. One page trying to cover everything ranks for none of it.
• The Business Profile agrees with the website. Same name, same services, same categories.
• Reviews describe the work. Google reads review text, and so do the AI summaries that now sit above some results.

None of it is clever. It's the same work on every site, done properly and kept up.

What to do with this

Open Search Console, go to Performance, filter queries containing "near me", and export the list. You'll probably find more of them than you expected, and you'll see which services and towns are missing pages.

If you'd rather we did it, the Site Audit includes this export and a list of the pages we'd build first. The full case studies, with the same Search Console data, are on the work page.