Recently, my wife and I made plans to go to dinner with friends. We had eaten at all of the “regular” places and were feeling adventurous so we decided to try something new. We went online, typed in our city, the kind of food we want to eat, and the word “restaurant”. “Boston Chinese restaurant” or “Boston Italian restaurant” or something like that.

Very convenient! Google is “feeding” the local search frenzy by providing services like adding your place of business to a map that appears at the top of local searches.

Alllll the way back in 2005, The Kelsey Group (an advisory service specializing in internet marketing and other marketing channels) found that 70% of internet searches use the web to find local businesses. (Read their findings here).

That was 4 years ago and that number had increased by 16% between October 2003 and March 2005 (an increase of basically 1% per month).

I believe that this number is going to be much higher now for the following reasons:

1. There has been a growing emphasis on local search since then
2. Wifi has become more ubiquitous, allowing for search-on-the-go
3. Social networking sites have seen growth in the local side of networking (an example being Twitter, which is used to connected globally but also locally through hashtags like #nyc or #la or #miami or #boston, etc.)
4. Smartphones (especially the the iPhone) offers numerous apps geared to local businesses.