According to Google, 20% of all searches are related to location. And since comScore reports that over 14 billion searches were conducted through Google in March, this means nearly 3 billion Google search queries contained local terms. Searches like “Nike shoes in Evansville IL” or “dentists 60181”.
Nearly 2 million listings on Google have been claimed by business owners on Google Places - which still represents only about 15% of small businesses. These Place Pages are viewed millions of times each day.
These statistics only reiterate what we have known for a long time now – local search optimization is a crucial part of every SEO campaign. If 20% of all searches come with local qualifiers, businesses are missing out on at least 20% of their potential traffic by neglecting to optimize for local search terms.
Visits by Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Across Google, Yahoo! and Bing
Below are some more useful statistics that illustrate how big local search has become:
- 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, and of those consumers
- 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline” (NPD Group)
- 73% of activity online is in one way or another “related to local content” (Google 5/07)
- 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, and of those consumers
- 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline” (NPD Group)
- New Research by The Kelsey Group and ConStat Indicates 70% of U.S. Households Now Use the Internet When Shopping Locally for Products and Services.
- 70% of online searchers will use local search to find offline businesses. The TMPDM-comScore study shows 86 percent of online users will be searching for a local business at some point in time. Research by Kelsey Group
- 43% of search engine users are seeking a local merchant to buy something offline. Source: comScore Networks
- 54% of search users have substituted Internet/search for the phone book. Source: comScore Networks
- The Kelsey Group reports that 74 percent of Internet users perform local searches.
- There are approximately 300 million searches per day for information on the Internet (Nielsen/NetRatings 2005)
- 60% of activity online is one way or another “related to local content” (Google 5/03)- For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, “E-Commerce Gets Smarter“)
- 117 million Internet users accounted for over 3.7 billion searches conducted on the Internet in the month of August 2004 (comscore qsearch, 01/2004-4/2004)
- 25% of ALL commercial Internet searches are conducted by users looking for local merchants (Kelsey-Bizrate 2004)
- For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, “E-Commerce Gets Smarter“)
- 35% of ALL searches are “local” (DM News)
To help businesses further develop their local search strategies, EZlocal’s staff of Google Certified technicians help business’s achieve top organic placement on Local Maps as well as first page placement, daily, in Sponsored Ads.
What really separates EZlocal from our competitors is our unique position in the marketplace as both a local search directory as well as Google Certified local search marketing firm. As a top local search site, EZlocal is able to leverage key partnerships within the industry to benefit small business clients in unique ways that no other traditional SEO firms can to distribute enhanced business profiles to 100+ sites reaching over 90% of where local search occurs.
EZlocal Search campaigns - which include organic Maps Optimization and professional AdWords Management start as low as $95 per month.
EZlocal’s budget search engine advertising campaigns are designed to help you achieve top local placement on sites like Google and Yahoo as well as relevant and high traffic search directories, social networks, online maps, and mobile devices.
A Web presence in today’s online environment is a must for business owners that don’t want to suffer massive attrition as old customers leave to competitors that have a Web presence.
