Why it Matters

Traditional phone book advertising is dying and local online search is exploding
  • 54% of consumers say they replaced the phone book with the Internet
  • 1.8 billion searches made by consumers looking for local businesses every month
  • 43% of searches on Google include a geographic identifier like a city or a zip code
  • 70% of Internet users report using search engines to find a local service
  • Offline sales influenced by consumers’ online browsing and research will increase by 12% over the next five years
Organic and local search outperform paid search
  • 85% of searchers don’t click on paid links
  • 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching
  • 40% of SEO campaigns achieve ROI in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value
  • Organic search results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked on than paid search results.
  • Over the last year, Pay-per-click (PPC) costs have grown 37% and they are continuing to rise.
Appearing on the front pages of the search engines means more phone calls
  • 54% of consumers say they replaced the phone book with the Internet
  • 1.8 billion searches made by consumers looking for local businesses every month
  • 43% of searches on Google include a geographic identifier like a city or a zip code
  • 70% of Internet users report using search engines to find a local service
  • Offline sales influenced by consumers’ online browsing and research will increase by 12% over the next five years