Since its founding in 2004, Yelp has become a major force in local commerce, with 186 million people using it on various devices each month to post nearly 150 million business reviews and counting, according to the most recent data. Today, Yelp is a multibillion-dollar empire built on digital interactions between consumers and local businesses.

Yelp’s rise hasn’t come without controversy, with some arguing that it’s not fair to put small businesses’ reputations on display online. To paraphrase the ubiquitous Fergie, that thinking is “so 2008.”

The truth is, Yelp didn’t create the Web 2.0 movement that enabled everyday internet users to create content and share it with the whole world. What Yelp did do, however, is harness shifts in consumer behavior to create the best marketing channel of all time for local businesses. Today, Yelp is joined by dozens of other popular consumer review sites as the first place shoppers go to find businesses nearby. As long as they’re governed correctly, these sites are a boon to small, local businesses.

In fact, if you run a small business today, the single most important thing you can do to attract new customers is to take control of your online review score on sites like Yelp, Google My Business, FourSquare and TripAdvisor. More on that soon, but first, let’s take a quick look at how technology has transported the classic small business storefront onto the internet.

Mobile Is Driving Local

Even the busiest business owner must recognize that access to real-time information has exploded. Internet usage in the U.S. has doubled since 2001 to nearly 300 million users, and smartphone penetration has risen from 20% in 2010 to 69% in 2017 among American consumers. Everyone has the internet in their pocket all the time, and this changes everything for small businesses.

This dramatic shift in technology adoption has led to similarly dramatic shifts in consumer behavior. About 90% of global sales still happen in physical stores, but 97% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses and three in four people who use their smartphones to search for something nearby end up visiting a local business within a day. Foot traffic to retail businesses is down 57% in the past five years, but the value of every visit has tripled.

For small businesses, this means the iconic physical storefront has been replaced by many digital ones. Consumers are using the internet to figure out where they want to spend money locally before they go there, and their visits are increasingly prompted by real and urgent purchasing intent.