How important is local to Google?  Google revealed today that nearly one third of all mobile searches are local based.   For local businesses, this is a pretty impressive stat with how mobile users are utilizing location based searching to discover businesses around them.

Nearly one third of all mobile searches are related to location. People’s online and offline worlds are colliding — whether you’re researching restaurant ideas for dinner on Friday night or looking for a store that sells rain boots in your size.

While Google has stressed the importance of mobile for the past couple of years – especially with more than 50% of all worldwide searches occurring on a mobile device – this also shows the importance for local businesses to get on board with a mobile-friendly website to be able to serve those 1/3 of mobile searchers better.  And with the added mobile friendly ranking boost, unless the search is for their business site, it is unlikely that they would rank for the non-brand queries, and instead a mobile friendly competitor would.

Far too many local businesses are still running with a desktop only version of their websites, but especially when you consider the mobile friendly ranking boost combined with 1/3 of mobile searches having local intent, not having a mobile friendly website will clearly hurt their visibility and cost them potential customers.