ICS Blog RSSWhere do you go to find information on a business?
We have had some discussion around the office recently on where people go today when they want to find a particular business or business product? It use to be that our only option was to pull out the “Yellow Pages”. Obviously today, the Internet has changed our world in this area … but, how many people are really using the Internet instead of the Yellow Pages?
Well, my informal poll is really inconclusive. Some still use Yellow Pages, some exclusively use the Internet and some use a mix of both depending on what their need is.  I searched the Internet for some more statistical backing in this area. The reports I found were a little dated and one can only believe that today’s stats would point to an even greater share of consumers using the Internet:
-  –In June 2007, comScore Networks reported that 60% of local consumers now go online to search for local businesses, as opposed to 33% that go first to the printed Yellow Pages.
- –Almost 40% of local shoppers say that a presence on the Internet – or lack of presence – will affect their decision about who they do business with. [Source: Web.com, 2007]
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Nearly 137 billion searches were conducted at the five U.S. core search engines in 2008, representing an increase of
21 % versus the previous year. [Source: comScore Networks, 2009] - Search query growth was driven largely by an increase in searches per searcher, which rose 16% from the previous year, while number of unique searchers grew 6% .  [Source: comScore Networks, 2009]
- Google Sites, which generated nearly 85 billion searches in 2008, accounted for nearly 90 percent of the total growth in
search query volume during the year. [Source: comScore Networks, 2009]
Clearly, every business needs to think through how they establish their electronic presence … as it is an increasing part of every company’s marketing efforts.
Thank you for your comments. I hope you found this information helpful and you were able to apply it successfully. Stayed tuned for more posts and thanks for reading!