Search Engine Market Share in 2010
The reason we all work so hard to become experts on how to get good search engine visibility on Google is because of Google's massive market share. Since almost everyone does their searches on Google, why bother putting energy into marketing on other search engines?
Well, here is some data on search engine market share that might surprise you. According to a report by Hitwise (which is owned by Experian, those people that track your personal credit score) published last week (Feb 10, 2010),15% of searchers are using Yahoo!? More than 9% of searchers are using Bing. Here is the search engine market share report.
Even more interesting is the trend. Right now Bing is the fastest growing search engine. They put a deal in place that makes them the default search engine for Verizon Blackberry users and even pushed a Bing search app onto customer phones. They also made a deal with Yahoo! so soon Yahoo! search will actually be powered by Bing. Here's the press release on that from Yahoo!. Google market share dropped 1% and Yahoo by 2%. If you follow the math you'll realize that if Google loses 1% of market share that's a lot more people than the 4% gain Ask.com got. Think about it like this: If you have one dollar and I give you another dollar, you now have 100% more money thanks to my dollar. However, if you had 100 dollars and I gave you 50 dollars, you only have 50% more money even though you have 50 more dollars. Bing picked up 5% in January from December.
What does this mean for your business? According to the Hitwise report, Bing is growing really fast at sending customers to businesses. For example, in the automotive industry, bing sent 89% more customers to businesses than the previous year, compared to Yahoo decreasing by 10% and Google growing by 16%. For shopping, Google gained 13% from the previous year, Yahoo lost 13%, but Bing picked up 84%, probably in part due to Bing's awesome cashback system (I like to stack a 5% Bing cashback reward on top of a 5% cash back discount from Discover card rewards shopping. I'm not getting anything for plugging this stuff by the way and I saved a lot on a great Sony video recorder).
Another important SEO trend: People are learning to use search engines better by making more specific queries. A phrase like boat insurance could mean the searcher wants to get information on making a claim, the reputation of a firm, she may want to find out if she needs to buy boat insurance by law, or she may be seeking to buy affordable boat insurance. When people enter a more specific query like "buy boat insurance" they're going to get more accurate results. This also makes an SEO's job easier. Remember our rule #1 for SEO is to make your content relevant to what searchers are looking for. So, this trend makes our method even more effective.
Our opinion: Here at SEO Bold we think these trends are a good thing. Competition is always good for the consumer, no one search engine should dominate too much. We love Yahoo! because they provide great tools for internet marketers and provide free, easy to use APIs and good documentation. We love Bing because, well, we love those awesome pictures on the home page, but more importantly, Bing is really easy to optimize for and makes a lot of sense to us. Bing also shows results from SEO efforts faster than Google. At this point Google is playing catch up trying to replicate some of Bing's features. If you haven't tried it, I suggest committing to one week of Bing use to see how you like it. Use the right tool for the right job.
The Lesson:
Pay attention to Bing, and master it. Focus your efforts there as in 2010 - 2011 they're really going to pay off. We're focusing a lot of SEO energy into knowing everything we can about Bing as part of our strategy going into the new year.
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