With the rapidly expanding use of mobile web capability, SEO results for location is now a priority. According to stats reported by Search Engine Land,
business profile pages reported indexed in Google over the past 24 hours came from the following sources:
- Yellowpages.com: 219
- Superpages.com: 553
- Yelp.com: 928
- Foursquare.com: 11,300
Now, if you don’t know what foursquare is, here’s a little taste from their own site:
foursquare aims to encourage people to explore their neighborhoods and then reward people for doing so. We do this by combining our friend-finder and social city guide elements with game mechanics – our users earn points, win mayorships and unlock badges for trying new places and revisiting old favorites… In our iPhone and mobile_web app, we call attention to venues who offer special treatment to foursquares users. If a foursquare user is at your bar/restaurant, we’ll tell them what they have to do to unlock a free snack or discounted drink. If they happen to be across the street or two blocks away from your venue, we’ll let them know that your business gives special treatment to foursquare users and that they should swing by for a visit.
Foursquare is more than a social network and gaming site – it’s making it way easier for searchers to find great deals from their mobile phones, kicking up the need for excellent SEO services geared towards mobile search.
TechCrunch reports that foursquare may indeed the the next big thing, in a post dated Jan 12, 2010:
Last Friday, the location-based service Foursquare announced that it was opening their service to be used anywhere in the world. The following day, they saw the biggest day in terms of usage ever, apparently.
This past Saturday, Foursquare was averaging more than a check-in a second, according to this tweet from the official account. Some quick math tells me that this means they must have seen over 86,000 check-ins in that 24 hour span. While Foursquare hasn’t publicly stated how many users they have, our best guess is that the number is something around 200,000 (with many following Scoble) and growing fast.
Wow. Foursquare may indeed be a player in the so-called location wars, local businesses would be wise to take note.
Tags: foursquare, location, mobile search