Local SEO for Mobile Search

During the recent Inside Search Event on June 14, 2011, Google announced that it will focus its attention on mobile searching as searches done on smart phones dramatically increased. According to Google, mobile search traffic has grown five-times in the past two years. The advent of smart phones has enabled users to connect to the Internet even when they are away from their laptop and desktops.

Google launched mobile shortcuts on Google’s mobile homepage to make mobile searching easier. These shortcuts lead to categories like restaurants, bars, coffee shops, etc. When you tap on any business, you will have the full business information such as hours of operations, phone number, address, customer reviews, and more. This is what Google refers to as simplified Places on mobile.

Advantage of Mobile Search for Local Businesses

The Google Mobile Ads team has put together this compelling video that includes very important stats that will show you why your local business needs to take advantage of mobile search:

It has become clear that local businesses should leverage the increasing number of smart phone users who rely heavily on their mobiles to search for things to do, eat, and see around their cities. As the Google Mobile Ads team puts it in the video, “Your customers are on mobile; as a marketer, you need to be on mobile, too. It’s time to use mobile to your advantage. And it’s not too late to be early.”