The year 2020 tested marketers across the globe both with the ability to be agile and pivot efforts quickly amid times of adversity. Local consumers’ search behavior changed dramatically, digital adoption accelerated by years, and the Coronavirus pandemic has left a crater in brands’ historic data that makes it really questionable as to whether the entire year should just be thrown out as far as planning for 2021 is concerned.

In the face of so much uncertainty, let’s focus on what we do know:

• People didn’t stop shopping locally due to the pandemic. In fact, as supply chain interruptions affected imports and consumers realized the impact of their purchasing decisions on family and friends, the trend to shop locally experienced a resurgence. Local search views were up across the board from March through September as people tried to source their needs at shops and businesses nearby.
• Enterprise local marketers finding themselves under the gun to orchestrate a recovery in 2021 with a slimmer budget than before will need to choose their channels and tactics judiciously. When it comes to organic search, Google is still the dominant search engine worldwide, its 92.7% market share dwarfing Bing and Yahoo! at 2.73% and 1.47%, respectively. 
• In mobile search, where Bing and Yahoo combined account for less than 3% of market share, optimizing for Google is even more essential.
• Despite the turmoil and upset of this past year, best practices for local SEO and inbound marketing really haven’t changed dramatically. Google is evaluating search results based on a number of factors including on-page optimization, backlinks, and user behavior signals.

In this new infographic, you’ll find up-to-date insights as to where consumers are spending their time online now, which mapping services they’re using to get around, what Google is looking for when ranking search results organically and in the Map Pack, and more:

Want more local marketing resources? Keep up with our always-expanding library of local paper writings marketing updates and best practices.