Accommodation Search on a BlackBerry Mobile Phone

More and more, our customers carry phones with powerful Internet capability with Google Search, Google Maps and the ability to view websites. Match that with GPS and you have the ability to quickly and easily find services around you, or at any specified destination, in the palm of your hand.

Accommodation Search on my BlackBerry phone

In my case, I have a BlackBerry, but you’ll get the same capability with an IPhone, and many other web enabled mobile phones. I would expect you’ll see the same linkage from car navigation systems soon, but to my knowledge it’s not available in Australia yet.

With my BlackBerry, I open a Google Maps application and set it to ‘my location’. Then, I see a blinking dot that shows my position to within a couple of metres. My Location moves as I move.

Next, I Search for “Motel”, or “Pizza”, and all businesses normally found in Google Maps are displayed with red dots on my phone screen. Like any Google Locality Search, there are 10 dots displayed; each has an info bubble with address, phone number, reviews, links to website. I can zoom in and out and I can click to view the next 10 results. In this case, I’ve searched generally for ‘Motels in Murwillumbah‘ and found Poinciana Motel in Murwillumbah.

Mobile Phones have an added feature because any phone number is like a hyper link – just click it and the phone rings the business.

So, you can quickly find what you want, see the location, read a review and then click to call.

How Can You Optomize Your Website to Display on Mobile Search Results?

Google gives businesses powerful tools to manage their listing on Google Maps via the Local Business Centre. If you have a locality based business, you should immediately update your listing in Google’s Local Business Centre.  It is a very powerful tool to improve search results.