Local Search and Mobile Search Business Focused in U.S., according to

Mobile media analysis mogul, M:Metrics, released a summary of their study on how and where smartphone users in the United States and United Kingdom are spending their time online. The results should be thought-provoking for small businesses which are increasingly relying on the local search capabilities of potential customers to find their ‘bricks-and-mortar” storefronts online before they visit these businesses’ actual locations.

The M:Metrics press release shows that smartphone users in the U.S. (and this study did not include users of either of the most popular iPhone or BlackBerry devices) spend over four and a half hours per month online from their moblies: and their most frequent and popular destination was Craigslist, where they speculate mobile search of classified ads, such as for yard sales and local happenings, is the driver for mobile users.

“Among smartphone users in the United States, mobile browsing has increased 89% year over year, and pageviews have increased 127 percent,” M:Metrics’ senior analyst Mark Donovan observes. The increasing popularity of U.S. online search, which is higher than in the U.K. and where local search and commerce seem to be the more dominant focus, is attributable, according to M:Metrics, to “the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the U.S., where 10.9 percent of users have an unlimited data plan versus only 2.3 percent in Britain.”

Revieiwng M:Metrics numbers, Web journalist, Stephen Lawson, writing in Macworld notes, “Mobile surfers in the U.S. spend more time on classified-ad site Craigslist than on any other website, and they spent nearly twice as much time browsing as their British counterparts.” It is likely, one would assume that ecommerce will play an ever-bigger part of moblile search as technology and familiarity expand.

As small business and growing businesses increasingly embrace the potentials of local search and mobile search to grow their revenue streams – ensuring their sites can be found and read online – the increasing familiarity of the consuming public in North American and in Europe with mobile search technology will undoubtedly push these numbers higher and higher. Expect the huge year-over-year growth rates to continue and accelerate.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.