Local SEO: 16 Surprising Stats That Prove Its Importance

If you’re serious about boosting your presence online, there’s no better time than now to jump into local SEO and start optimizing your website for success. Here are 16 stats for proof.

A strong local SEO strategy is key to driving more people to your store, whether you have one storefront or five hundred.

When you’re looking for a local business that’ll fix your favorite pair of shoes, sell you the book your friend recommended, or bake a spaceship-themed cake for your kid’s birthday — how do you find it?

You pull up your favorite search engine for a little online research, of course.

Your customers are no different. When they’re looking for a product or service similar to what your local business sells, they’re going online to find it.

Did you know that 97% of users searched online to find a local business? In fact, 78% of local searches on mobile result in an offline purchase!

Take a look at these 16 local SEO facts and see why utilizing SEO could help your organization. (And to learn which parts of your site to optimize for local searches, check out this post.) 

Local SEO Stats  

• 30% of all mobile searches are related to location. (Think With Google)
• 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. (Think With Google)
• 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (Think With Google)
• Yelp appears in the top five search results for 92% of Google web queries that include a city and business category. (Fresh Chalk)
• 54% of smartphone users search for business hours, and 53% search for directions to local stores. (Think With Google)
• About 45% of global shoppers buy online and then pick up in-store. (Think With Google)
• “Where to buy” + “near me” mobile queries have grown by over 200% from 2017 to 2019. (Think With Google)
• Mobile searches for “store open near me” (e.g., “grocery store open near me”) have grown by over 250% from 2017 to 2019. (Think With Google)
• Mobile searches for “on sale” + “near me” (e.g., “tires on sale near me”) have grown by over 250% YOY from 2017 to 2019. (Think With Google)
• 64% of consumers use Google My Business (GMB) to find business addresses or phone numbers (Murphy, 2020).
• Proximity ranks 3rd place among Google local ranking factors. On a scale of 1 (most important) to 10 (least important): consistency of citations (5.6), physical address in the city of search (6.1), the proximity of the searcher to the place of business (6.4), Google Reviews (6.5), and Google My Business (7.4) (MOZ, 2020).
• Over 50% of ‘near me’ searches result in a physical store visit (Sullivan, 2018).
• 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else (Birkett, 2020).
• The results listed in the top three Google search results account for more than 75% of all clicks (Dean, 2019).
• 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles of their location (Birkett, 2020).
• 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations (Birkett, 2020).

Local SEO

From reviewing these 16 facts, it’s clear that local SEO is important in the online world. It can be a powerful tool to help your business improve its visibility on search engine result pages, leading to more customers and, ultimately, more revenue. As companies worldwide become increasingly aware of the potential SEO has to offer, it looks as though this trend will continue in years to come. That said, if you’re serious about boosting your presence online, there’s no better time than now to jump into local SEO and start optimizing your website for success.

With the right approach and commitment, using local SEO can pay off in numerous ways for businesses operating at any scale. Ultimately, however, it all comes down to you finding a reliable marketing partner who understands both your vision and goals – an essential part of making sure your local SEO efforts are successful.

Talk to Us About Local SEO!

By Leslie Radford

**Updated November 2023