Many people in our industry believe that the world of SEO starts and ends with Google. The trouble is that our profession involves “search engine optimisation” and not just “Google optimisation”. Now it’s right in many cases that Google should get the most attention - we do not dispute this - but it is easy to go overboard and discount the other major players as if they didn’t exist. This could be a dangerous business when their market share is slowly creeping upwards.
We like and respect Google but we need to keep reminding our clients that it isn’t the only search engine in town. Some stats recently released by Comscore reveal that roughly speaking, Google has half of the US search engine traffic, Yahoo! gets a quarter and MSN gets a tenth. But these are all big numbers – you can see that in July Google had 4bn searches, Yahoo! had 2bn and MSN had 1.1bn. These figures (though American and not entirely representative of the UK market) are not to be ignored.
There are three reasons why marketing managers should not lose track of Yahoo!, MSN and even Ask:
Many internet users are fiercely loyal to their search engines – sure, the majority of them use Google, but there are others who, for whatever reason, will be more comfortable with Yahoo! or MSN and even with search engines that are not major name brands. They might prefer the interface (Yahoo! and MSN have more activity on their front pages, including news, sports and weather), they might feel that the results are more relevant, or maybe they may just have their PC pre-configured to a default non-Google search engine. But for whatever reason, your Google listings (from AdWords or SEO) will not reach them and your page may not appear on their search engine listings.
Even if Google lasts until the internet becomes obsolete or human life dies out, your experimentation won’t have been in vain. There’s no harm in a little more exposure, even if the market seeing it doesn’t match the traffic of Google. If it does on the other hand, you’re laughing.
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