Local insurance agencies in the US need to do more to rise up their presence in search engine listings, it has been suggested.
According to Confluency Solutions, many agencies are fading to make the most of the rise of local search by claiming listings in services such as Google Maps.
It cites figures indicating that 87 per cent of web searches carry "local intent" and notes that Google results tend to include Google Maps schedule when a local query is conducted.
As such, insurance firms would do well to glance into local search engine optimisation, the company says.
"Insurance agencies need to recognise they are losing dozens and dozens of customers every month - often more - because they aren't showing up in Google Maps and other local search engines," comments Kevin McDonald, president of Confluency Solutions.
Diana Pouliot of Google recently told the Mobile Marketing & Advertising occurrence in Las Vegas that a third of all mobile queries conducted on the search engine are linked in some way to the searcher's local surroundings, Mobile Marketing Watch reported.
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Today you may notice a change to the Google News home page: Near the bottom, Google is now displaying stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service that Google launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so Google will continue to experiment with the format. But so far Google has found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites.
In December Google further added more than 50 newspapers, magazines, web outlets news wires and TV and radio broadcasters, bringing the total number of news sources discoverable in Fast Flip to more than 90. Encouraged by the positive feedback Google received from users and partners, it decided to expose the service to more potential readers by integrating it with the U.S. English version of Google News.