They look for the sake of finding and when they find what they are looking for they take action.
According to a report released by WebVisible, a company who tracks small business search advertising trends:
- 70% will call a phone number found on a website
- 60% have referred a company that they found on the Internet to a friend
- 52% always or often research online first, then follow up with an offline purchase from a local business
- 14% will send an email to a business they found online
- 11% will fill out an online form
Additionally, according to Google about 20% of all Google searches have a local intent behind them with that number rising to about 33% for Google searches via the mobile web .
Is 20% big numbers? Well in the world of search 20% of Canadian generated queries trafficked by Google is about 16.
5 million queries per day or 2.
5 billion (yes, I said billion) local queries on Google each month.
So there is unquestionably a lot of interest in local searches, and many of those people who are looking for local businesses follow up their online research and comparisons with an offline purchase as substantiated by a Google-sponsored comScore.
com study on the influence of online search on offline buying behavior where it is reported that 63% of people who make a purchase after online search activity do so offline.
Although it commonly takes a website some time to be positioned in the top of Google's organic search results the only approach to reaching the top of Google's local search results is by creating or claiming an existing local listing.
Whether you are a small business with one site or a major corporation with offices in locations across the country or spanning the world, local search marketing is absolutely critical to its success if it relies in any way on local customers.