About 20 percent of online searches have a local intent, where users are looking for businesses, organizations, events, and other information in a specific geographic area.

Yahoo! has taken some pages from the Bing and Google search playbooks and enhanced the Yahoo! Shortcut for local businesses to include links to information user’s care most about (reviews, an overview, photos, and directions) and an overlay that displays that content directly on the search results page.

For example, we took a few of our sales staff out to lunch at Carlucci’s in Rosemont to celebrate their birthday’s yesterday. If we had searched for that restaurant on Yahoo! today we would have seen the following search result:



Yahoo! also enhanced its category searches. Say for example we had had not known about this restaurant but still wanted to go to an Italian restaurant, we could have searched for “Italian food in Rosemont IL” and been presented with the following:



If you haven’t added your business to Yahoo! Local (or any of the other local search resources, it is apparent now that you’ll need to start if you want to remain competitive as search engines provide deeper exposure to businesses within local results.