According to Lawrence Coburn, the President of RateItAll, this is an exciting time for search marketers due to new opportunities in search queries. Historically, people would go to a search engine and enter a query. Now however, with a mere tap of a button on a phone, people can send out their location and it acts as a query.

Coburn comes from a user-generated content background and knows that it is not easy to get people to post content. But with check-in applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla, a single tap on a phone creates the content.

These applications tell your friends where you are while also letting Foursquare and Gowalla what places are popular. In addition, this data provides valuable opportunities for advertisers to get involved with location.

What does all this mean for search marketers? Location is important to them because they can build upon the APIs that Foursquare, Gowalla, and other similar applications have. Coburn’s company is even developing a product called DoubleDutch that will allow users to build their own Foursquare and Gowalla if they have a community tied to a specific location.

Because this idea of location as a query is relatively new, there are and will be challenges for search marketers. To help avoid them, Coburn advises marketers to create content around latitude and longitude. By doing this, marketers will know what to deliver when people reveal their location.

How do you feel about using location as a query?