How Local Search Engines Drive More Business To Local Retailers

Here are four interesting reports that all essentially tell the same story of how online search is driving retail in store sales.

The first comes from Jupiter Research, were it points out the large disparity between online influence and online ad spending. If you are in the online advertising industry, this clearly demonstrates the market potential that this market sector has.



The next two reports come from the Kelsey Group, where they are attempting to show the diminishing influence that traditional local information source are having (like newspapers and paper based yellow pages). This means that yellow page searches fell 13% over the course of these two years (2003 - 2005) and online local search grew by 10% over the same period.



Here is another chart from the Kelsey Group that essentially tells the same story of how the yellow pages are losing their influence and being replaced by local web searches



Finally in a TKG / BizRate survey from 9/04, it shows that of the total number of online searches that are performed across all search engines, nearly 10% of all of these queries have been localized AND are intended for local retail businesses. That really is a strong statistic if you think of it in context of ALL the billions of searches that are performed by users online.