Google, Bing, and the other search engines have revolutionized how we learn, how we collaborate, how we shop and how we interact within our local communities. Today, Google alone handles more than 100 billion searches per month around the world. Of those searches,
4 billion desktop queries per month in the United States alone have local intent .
50%+ of mobile queries have local intent.
Roughly 15-20% of all searches are mobile .
From these numbers, we can extrapolate that there are approximately seven billion unique local searches per month on Google in the United States.
Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are all currently returning local results that have challenged traditional print Yellow Pages and, in many areas, exceeded their usage as the preferred method for discovering local businesses and local information. As of March 9, 2009, Google began showing local results for generic queries, meaning that Internet users no longer need to include any city or geographic terms in their search to be shown results that are local to their location.
Additionally, mobile search is absolutely exploding. Leading analyst firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that mobile local search volume will surpass desktop local search volume in 2015. Mobile searches primarily pull their results from local search engines.