A year ago, a big change occurred in the search engine market. Microsoft's Bing started to power the organic search results for Yahoo search. And in the past 12 months, the two Bing-powered search engines have gained 4% of the search engine market share in the United States.
However, what might be more interesting is, in that same period of time, Google slipped 6% points in search engine marketing share. This data comes to us thanks to the newest Experian Hitwise report.
In August, Bing represented 28.99% of United States searches. This is up from 24.56% a year ago. At the same time, Google fell from 71.59% a year ago to 65.09% in August 2011.
So what? Google still has the vast majority of the search engine market share, right? Yes. Although these changes are relatively small, they indicate major possible changes in the future. If Google can lose this much ground from one competitor in a year, what will happen when social networks like Facebook and Twitter become more competitive in search?
Marketing Takeaway
Search engines and, subsequently, search engine optimization are changing. Yes, Google is still the dominant player today. But instead of focusing all of your search engine optimization strategy solely on search engine results rankings within Google, you must adopt a well rounded SEO strategy. Work on building authority to your business website by generating inbound links through blogging and other content creation tactics. Maximize the reach of your content by sharing it in social media to ensure that your content takes advantage of search engines using social signals to determine rankings.
Are you focusing too closely on Google in your SEO strategy?
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Frank Reed 11:09 AM on September 09, 2011
One thing that is evident is that Twitter and Facebook likely won't become more proficient search. It's a lot harder to do effective search than most of us know and it would take these two so far off their core product offering that their best bet is to partner. Facebook has Bing and we see where that has gotten them. In fact, if Facebook is giving that much more search traffic to Bing a 4% increase is really an underwhelming number.