Proximity search is a way of making searches more semantic. For example, searching for “manage people” close to the word “people” will find bios of people who have managed others, whereas the same words searched in a regular phrase search would only find the other term somewhere on the page. Google proximity search allows proximity search by using the AROUND(X) connector, where X is a number indicating how many words apart you want to see the search terms.

How do I do a proximity search on Google?

For example, you might use “advanced search” to specify that you only want to see results that include both the phrase “people managing” and the term “manage”. Then, for every document that matches your criteria, Google will only return one result. This saves you time from looking at multiple documents that don’t meet your requirements.

Google has several different proximity search connectors, including inurl and allinurl, to help you filter results by whether they are part of a URL or all in the content. There’s also define:, which lets you search for a specific word or phrase and will provide its definition and meaning.

While proximity bias does play a role in local search rankings, it’s just one of hundreds of factors that influence your small business SEO performance. Make sure you’re incorporating local information into your website and social media posts to help Google determine that there’s local intent with your searchers. You can also use BrightLocal’s visual local search grid rank tracker to get a real-time view of your results as searchers expand out into different parts of the map.