Tides are Turning for Local Search
Once you used to reach for the paper business directory to find a good driving school or electrician, but now it would appear that trends are changing. We recently commissioned a poll carried out by YouGov that aimed to investigate this very thing, the findings were really interesting and at the same time quite environmentally shocking.
It highlighted that people really are making a technological leap of faith and are increasingly using the Internet to find local businesses. 51% of people asked, reported that they used the Internet most to find a local business, and a whopping 67% said that they trusted word of mouth more than an advert when finding local businesses. This is good news for welovelocal.com as we endeavor to bring word of mouth and all its quality online.
It is not a case of just looking at the technological benefits of people migrating their local search to the Internet; this could go a long way in reducing waste. Over 17.5 million unwanted directories are delivered to homes in Britain every year this is a staggering amount of waste especially seeing as our poll showed that 35% of Brits no longer want to receive printed business directories. We did some calculations and if you placed all the unwanted directories end to end they would stretch 2,833 miles, and if stacked on top of each other they would be 50 times the height of Mount Everest – crazy!
Check out the rest of our results here.