Pronet Advertising

The little engines that could

The customer is always right, right? Unfortunately, sometimes doing only what customers want will hurt their business. This is a tough situation and it is our job to ensure that our customers understand what we think they should do and why. Recently, one of our clients was insisting that we optimize only for Google because they felt that most of their customers were coming from that search engine. While this might be understandable at first, here is why that path could jeopardize their business opportunity.

First of all, it is extremely important to pay attention to multiple search engines because it protects your business if you suddenly lose ranking on one search engine. If you are heavily relying on Google, they might implement a change that will suddenly drop your ranking and result in a dramatic fall in online revenue/leads. If you had optimized for other search engines, the problems with this would be less dramatic.

Another serious problem with sticking to only one search engine is the fact that you are potentially missing over 50% of your possible visitors. As the pie chart indicates, Google is indeed a large part of the equation but certainly not the majority. If you ignore all other search engines you are leaving plenty of customers for your competition.

These reasons should be compelling enough on their own, however if you still want to stick with just one of the major search engines at least do your homework and make sure you aren't missing out on anything or leaving your business vulnerable.