August 02, 2010 - The trend of mobile use has given us easy options for a better quality of life. One more convenience that an increasing number of people are opting is to use mobiles for local searches as it came out on 29th of July through a Yellow Pages Association (YPA) study based on comScore data. Highlights of the study are as follows:

On the mobile devices:

•    A year-over-year increase of 14% in the number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile device (to 17.3 million users in March 2010).

•    An increase of more than 16% year over year in the number of people accessing business directories at least once per week on a mobile (to nearly five million in March 2010).

•    A 42% year-over-year growth in the number of mobile subscribers using apps to access business directories.

One the non-mobile side:

•    A 4% increase on searches on IYPs and portal sites (to 444 million in March 2010 or annual 5.3 billion).

•    A traffic growth of three points (to 44% of visits) on IYPs from web search sites (Google, Yahoo etc.), from the first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010.

The increase in local mobile and web search comes as no surprise with more people using smartphones and more local businesses going for web presence now. Overall, with more mobile usage, more mobile local searches – a trend within a trend!