According to Google, last month over 200 local searches were made for
“salon crystal river”.
These searches were made by customers looking to purchase salon goods and services in the Crystal River, FL area. More importantly…
these searches were made by your potential customers!
Quick Stats
- 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“)
- 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)
Internet users are looking for “Local” businesses”
- 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)- 35% of ALL searches are “local” (DM News)
This graph illustrates the click percentages of sites on Google search results. As you can see, over HALF OF ALL searches click on the #1 ranked site. The results decrease exponentially as you drop in ranking to a mere 2.5% for the #10 position. Fewer still even make it to the second page of the search results!
