Don't Just Focus on Google

Why is it that we care about Google so much? I don't mean caring about the company and what it does, rather I mean optimizing websites specifically for Google, trying to get ranked on Google more than any other search engine, and above all, advertising exclusively on Google.

Richard MacManus provides some very interesting insight into the matter. According to figures released by Hitwise, not only is Google the most dominant search engine with 64% of the US market share, ( Yahoo! has 22%, Microsoft has 9% and Ask has 3%, with the rest attributed to other smaller sources) but Google is the only search engine that continues to grow in market share.

As you can see from the chart above, here are the growth rates for the 4 major search engines over the past one year:

Google: Up 9.94%
Yahoo!: Down 4.66%
Microsoft: Down 30.09%
Ask: Down 12.78%

These statistics explain why someone would impulsively care more about Google than the rest. However, keep in mind that while 64% is the majority and therefore perhaps more important to focus on, the remaining 36% is not trivial and shouldn't be overlooked.

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Matthias, April 12, 2007

But it's so much easier to focus on one which makes up 64% than on three which have 36% together. In addition, Google is even stronger in other countries than its competitors.

TeamTutorials, April 12, 2007

I will have to agree with mathias. Google is god for traffic.

Hashim, April 12, 2007

Focus on optimizing for Google, and the rest fall in line because they copy Google's ranking paradigm.

However, I agree that it's foolish to only advertise in Google. From what I've read from a few people, the ROI from advertising with the other guys is higher than Google.

Chris Sandberg, April 12, 2007

Even if you just focus on Google it is not like the other search engines will ignore your site. They all have similar algorithms so if you do well on Google it is likely that you will do well on the other search engines too.

As far as advertising goes Google's system in my opinion is a lot easier to work with and offers more as far as testing. My advice would be start on Google and test and measure everything, then copy what is working on the other search engines.

graham, April 13, 2007

Agree with what Chris has just added. The optimisation principles are almost identical. Sure you may have to tweak here and there but it's not as complicated or time sensitive as some SEO professionals make out.

Advertising is a different kettle of fish altogether. I know we've recently looked at the way we advertise online. Again we rely heavily on google to bring in our customers through focused PPC due to the volume of customers it brings. this does however allow us to be creative in other areas and more importantly test new ways to capture attention...

You can't get away from the dominance of Google!

Ron Diggity, April 13, 2007

I fear people will become dependent on Google, and Google will realize it, and then...

Adrian Offerman, April 13, 2007

I agree: optimize for Google, and you get the other search engines for free.

About advertising: the easy setup and no traffic requirements make Google the right choice to start with. If your traffic goes up, and you are serving a specific niche, go looking for a sales company/person. Good idea is to bundle your efforts with others in your niche, making it more/sooner worthwhile for a sales person to get involved.

Erik Schorr, April 13, 2007

I get about 76% of my visits from Google search. 5% comes from a friend's whale watch site, 3% from Yahoo, 1% from MSN, and the rest from other random places. Of course I'm going to optimize for Google! Listen to the street talk. They aren't saying "I Yahoo'd it, or, I MSN'd it". They Googled it.

Wayne Smallman, April 14, 2007

I get a shade of 60% of my traffic from Google.

Personally, I don't care which search engine I get my traffic from.

What I can tell you is, the other guys added together don't even add up to a whole percent...

Matt Jones, April 16, 2007

You can argue it both ways. You can say Google will send the most traffic because more people use it, but MSN search is less competetive to rank in because fewer sites optimise for it.

Sheri Bigelow, April 18, 2007

"Don't Just Focus on Google" is excellent advice, but I suspect that many in house web developers probably fall into doing just that. I think the people who just care about optimizing for Google probably aren't advertising and probably aren't running e-commerce sites. I think you have to know and optimize for all the engines if you care about conversion rates because each search engine brings with it a unique core audience that may convert differently depending on your site's message and goals. For example, is it true that the keywords meta tag is thought to be deprecated when it comes to Google, but does Yahoo still count it? Knowing the answer may bring you higher rankings in Yahoo (and other search engines) and would probably be overlooked if you just optimized for Google.

And, here's another question, won't having higher rankings in the other engines bring more visibility, more links, and therefore more authority in Google's eyes? So, couldn't you argue that optimizing specifically for other engines will also help you rank better in Google?

A slightly old but still relevant survey">http://www.iprospect.com/media/press2004_05_04.htm">survey by iProspect about search engine user attitudes reported that most Google users click organically ranked search results while MSN users tend to click the pay-per-click ads. The numbers may not be exactly the same today, but the principle is still true. You should customize your SEO efforts and PPC campaigns for search engine preferences as well as for the behavior of your site's unique audience.