A recently released study done by BabyCenter of over 5,000 moms has revealed the following interesting data:

59% of the mom-respondents had a smart phone of one sort or other, which is impressive when you consider that smart phone penetration among the rest of the US population is just above 30%.

Additionally, moms’ acceptance of smart phones has grown dramatically over the past 2 years. Just over half of these moms said that they bought a smart phone after having a child, with their mobile behavior being markedly different from prior to starting a family.

The most utilized smart phone features for moms, from highest to lowest, are: the built-in still camera, the video camera, and applications, with just over half of the moms saying that they had over 10 apps downloaded, with nearly a quarter of those related in some way to their children.

Moms use smart phones the most in the following cases:

Health: One-third of moms have used their smart phone for family related health issues in the past 30 days.

Social networking: moms are 40% more likely than average to use smart phones for various social networking activities, such as browsing news feeds, updating statuses, and finding answers to questions.

Shopping: 68% of moms use their smart phone while shopping to check product reviews and prices.

Compared to other gadgets and media, smart phone-toting moms use their phones twice as often as the TV and about 1.5 times more than a PC.

Almost half of respondents indicated they responded proactively to ads on their phones, with almost a third of them buying the featured items later on.

Everybody else uses their phones heavily during evenings and weekends, but moms are heavy morning and early afternoons users.

While the focus of most mobile marketing has been on teenagers and young males, moms are now an emerging dominant force in this area of the market.

The post Moms: The Untapped Market for Mobiles appeared first on LocalGiant.

The key to successful SEO marketing is thinking ahead. Every SEO marketing campaign will take some time before it truly takes hold, so you need to plan every step you want to take at least three months beforehand in order to get the best results. Let’s say you want to take advantage of the increase in the number of hits for the phrase ‘best surfing beaches’, which should peak around the summer months. To really get the most out of this trend, your campaign should be in place and ready to go by the end of February at the latest.

The next step is to figure out exactly when during the year specific SEO campaigns are at their most effective. The year-end holiday season, for example, is when searches for all sorts of items and phrases reach their peak as people rush to purchase gifts for their friends and loved ones. Your website must reflect the hottest trends at any given time, a feat that is not that hard to do with the availability of tools such as Google Trends. It provides a free listing of the most popular keywords, which is updated constantly. Effective use of such powerful tools at your disposal is one of the keys to a successful SEO campaign.

Getting the keywords right is one thing. You need to fulfill the other half of the bargain by making sure that the products that you market are appropriate to the season as well. It should be fairly obvious which products sell well during the winter months of the year, such as ski equipment, and which products are more inclined towards the warmer months, such as surfboards. Updating your site to take advantage of these predictable trends a month or two in advance will ensure that your sales stay at a high and steady rate.

The last thing you need to do is know your customer, because search trends don’t always necessarily translate to high sales. For example, if you’re selling summer holiday packages, then sales should spike in the months prior to the season, as these trips are usually booked a long time in advance. By studying and adapting to similar behavior, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the trends and consistently come up with effective SEO campaigns for all seasons.

The post Using Seasonal Trends to Maximize Your SEO Potential appeared first on LocalGiant.

A few of the more all encompassing changes were Google Instant and showing search engine results in real time. Results now change as search text is added, removed, or moved around. More emphasis is being placed on dates and timezones in order to provide more focused results for organic searches. Let’s not forget about Google Chrome, rated as the fastest browser available and destined to become even faster in 2011.

Some of the more interesting changes are the slight alterations to the user interface. These small alterations are designed to speed up and hone an individual search while offering a clean search engine with a plethora of possibilities. These changes include search tools that have been moved to the left side of the screen, an additional panel highlighting the most relevant search results, and predictive search queries automatically that bring up the most pertinent results(Google Instant). Additionally, a significant evolution to local search algorithm has been made. In the past, Google displayed top local search results that had optimized Google Places pages and a lot of web citations. Now, a lot of weight has been added for the website as a whole.

Google changes its algorithms often. In a very fluid market, it is impossible for the average website or small business owner to keep abreast of all of these changes. An SEO firm like LocalGiant could be your only viable option, if you want your company to shine in the local Google search engine results.

The post Google Changes For 2010 appeared first on LocalGiant.