What there is to do nearby, automatically on your page

Anyone considering a stay or a visit on your site has one question left after the photos and the price: what is nearby? Where do I buy bread, where do I eat, where do I take the children when it rains, and where is the nearest doctor.

That information is rarely on the page where it belongs. It lives in the owner's head, or in an outdated PDF last revised three years ago.

Why you do not do this by hand

Take a business with fifteen locations. Per location you want to name twenty to thirty places, spread across categories. That is well over four hundred entries, each with a name, a distance, an address and a link.

You can write that down once. The problem starts afterwards. Restaurants close, websites move, a museum changes address. Within a year part of your list is wrong, and a visitor who clicks a dead link remembers that.

Handwork does not solve this, because nobody checks four hundred entries a year.

GPS as the starting point

The basis is simpler than it looks. Every location has coordinates. From those coordinates you can ask an open map database what lies within a given radius.

For that I use OpenStreetMap: a worldwide map maintained by volunteers, businesses and municipalities. You ask for every supermarket, restaurant, doctor, petrol station, swimming pool and attraction within, say, fifteen kilometres, and you get them back with name, address, distance and where available a website.

That is done in one action, for all locations at once. What costs an afternoon per location by hand becomes a matter of waiting for the list to arrive.

The system proposes, the human chooses

The raw list is not what you publish. It contains plenty that is technically correct and adds nothing: a petrol station with no name, a restaurant that closed two years ago, the same supermarket chain three times over.

So it is a proposal. The manager sees the list per category with the distance alongside, ticks what genuinely matters and removes the rest. At a location they know well, they add something the map does not have.

That division is the whole point. The machine does the looking up, the measuring and the upkeep. The human does the choosing, because only they know that the village bakery is worth it and the supermarket by the motorway is not.

Outbound links are not a giveaway

Here I have to clear up a misunderstanding I still meet often.

Many companies are reluctant to link outwards, afraid of handing visitors or "value" to another site. That idea comes from a time when search engines worked very differently, and it no longer holds.

Links to real local businesses and institutions do two things you actually want. They help a search engine understand what your page is about and which region it belongs to, which feeds straight into your local visibility. And they make your page useful, so visitors stay on it longer and come back to it more often.

There is one condition, and it is not optional: the links have to work.

The trap: broken links and false alarms

The first version of the link checker I built was too eager. Three working French sites came out as broken.

The cause was instructive. The check requested an address as a script, not as a browser. Some sites block that, others redirect you first, and others return an error code while the page loads perfectly well.

The revised version fetches an address the way a visitor does, follows redirects to the end, and reports something as broken only when that is demonstrable. In case of doubt the link stays with a note attached, because removing a working link by mistake does more damage than leaving a dead one for a week.

On top of that, the manager can reverse a rejection by hand. That is not a luxury: with external sites no automated check gets it right every time.

Display: five per category is enough

Nobody reads a list of thirty places stacked up. So the page shows the five nearest per category, with the total count next to the category heading and the rest behind an expander.

That keeps the page short for someone glancing over it, and complete for someone actually planning. On a phone that is the difference between usable and endless scrolling.

What it gets you

Per location you get a block of content that is unique, stays current, and genuinely helps visitors. That is exactly the kind of content that sets a page apart from the ten others using the same boilerplate.

For your visibility it counts twice: more relevant text, a clear geographic signal, and links to sources in the same region. And the maintenance underneath is a periodic check that runs on its own.

Read also

• An image library that maintains itself: alt texts and photo review by AI, the same principle applied to images
• What AI really means for your SMB (without the hype), where automation does and does not pay off
• View all completed projects, web platforms and automation solutions

Do you have several branches or locations this would work for? Book a no-obligation call. With just the coordinates it is already possible to show what comes out for your locations.

Bert