Hitwise recently reported that Google served up about 70% of all internet searches done in June in the USA. While Google's competitors continue to struggle with keeping with the search giant, industry experts wonder if Google will continue gobbling up the competition.
One question that comes to mind for many of us in the search engine marketing industry is that, if Google continues it’s quest for world search domination, how much time should we continue to spend in paying attention to the ‘other guys’ in our search marketing efforts.
Since MSN, Yahoo and ASK still serve up a combined 30% of the total searches, paying attention to the smaller engines will still pay off. The smaller amounts of traffic generated from Google’s competitors can have a huge benefit on SEO results in the long term the same way that long-tail search strategies does. This consistent flow of traffic from other sources, no matter how small, adds up in the long run and helps to create stability in website traffic.
What this means for our SEO efforts?
Since Google still seems to consider linking to be more important than other SEO factors, it’s more important than ever to focus SEO efforts on building quality links. Although it is often the most time consuming and frustrating part of SEO, it also yields the greatest benefit. MSN and Yahoo still seem to consider the on-page factors as pretty important so we need to have continued diligence in using best practices for on-page optimization.
What’s great is that our efforts in all these areas will pay off to some extent in each search engine, regardless of which search engine is dominant.
