Does it really matter for which search engine you optimize as part of your Internet Marketing Plan?
Search engines; the gateways to the new frontier. Search engines allow the small business to play with the big business. They allow the Mom and Pop shop to have a voice and not be squashed by the marketing power of their much larger competitors.
There are huge advantages to the search engines. And with Google, Yahoo and Bing being the top tools available, the question is:
“Should I optimize for Google, Bing, yahoo, Ask, Yp, etc?”
It’s a great question and before we answer that question, lets take a quick look at how much of the market share each of these tools has here in the United States.
According to an article by Mashable in April 2011, Google maintains 64% of the market share, Bing & Yahoo combined have 30% (bing powers the Yahoo search engine so it makes sense to lump the two of them together) and everyone else in the world (ask.com, aol.com, ehow.com, etc.) are all scrounging for the remaining 5% of traffic in the US.
Percent of the Market share: Google 64.42% (Blue), Yahoo, 15.69% (green), Bing 14.32% (Red), Other 5.57% (Purple)
As you read some of the comments on the article mentioned above, you’ll also see that several people claim that Google drives 80%+. Not surprisingly, in our own stats and in looking at our own analytics, we see that Google drives about 89-90% of the traffic and bing/yahoo drive about 9-10% (the rest of the traffic is from other referring websites).
In addition to the stats, I periodically interview different clients of ours on the particular search engine they use. And the common response is, “Google”!
We do have a few clients that will use Bing. They tell me that it is primarily because it was the default search engine on their computer and they don’t know how to change it. They continue on to say that if they really need something, they go to Google.
So, now that we have some sort of a foundation from which to work, it makes many of our optimization decisions a little easier.
Predominately, for our clients, we use Google. That is the primary tool used by our clients customers and for that reason, we mainly optimize for Google.
(And, by the way, we’ve seen that Google has recently shifted their approach – again – and for that reason, our strategy on Google has shifted slightly to be more in-line with their algorithms).
However, with that being the case, we do realize that some segments of the market do appeal more to Bing versus Google. Typically, the technology driven markets lean toward Bing. For this reason, we would encourage that client to optimize Bing over Google.
If you have any questions regarding your online marketing plan or developing a strategic plan for y our business, contact Markomm an Internet Marketing Company. They will be able to help you develop a strategic internet marketing plan for your business.
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