An infographic from MDG Advertising said that 74 percent of consumers looking for information related to local businesses online do so on a search engine. Marketers should take this as their cue to launch local SEO initiatives to catch clicks from nearby prospects.
Search is and will continue to be the primary source of local information moving forward, and by 2015 30 percent of all searches will have a local intent. MDG estimates that revenue generated by local search will grow to more than $8.2 billion by 2015 in the next three years from its current position at $5.1 billion.
Greater use of mobile devices to locate nearby businesses will help drive the growth of local search. Since these devices use mobile search applications, the location data stored in their handsets is factored into search results, arguably making every mobile search a local one.
Currently, mobile users are turning to their smartphones and tablets for search more frequently. According to MDG, 20 percent use their mobile search app almost every day, which represents 20 percent growth over the same study in the previous year.
Businesses using content marketing and targeting prospects in their areas should take note that 12 percent of consumers say they always use local search and 36 percent say the results are convenient.
In terms of mobile search from smartphones, Google’s mobile operating system Android uses GPS information in its results as the default setting, though this can be switched off for the sake of privacy. Brafton recently reported that Android is the most popular mobile operating system on the market .
