One of the questions that I get from REALTORS all of the time while consulting is something like this…
“Do I need to worry about ranking in Yahoo and MSN as well as Google?”
“How much attention should I pay to Yahoo and MSN?”
While the questions vary slightly, the meaning is exactly the same. Each search engine is different. It is one thing to rank really well on one search engine. It is another thing entirely to rank on two (or more). In the past (before Bing and Yahoo announced that Bing would be powering Yahoo), the answer was splendidly easy. Just worry about Google. The rest do not matter. They simply do not have enough market share to matter.
But what about after Microsoft has spent over $100 million advertising Bing as the “decision engine”? What about once Yahoo is powered by Bing? Will they have enough market share to matter then?
A couple of insights are helpful. The first of them is to know how to get a monthly snapshot of the search engine market share.
Here is a link to Comscore, which provides one of those monthly snapshots.
This is for the August market share figures. September’s figures will be out in a week or two. By watching these figures monthly, you can easily track what impact marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and marketing agreements have on the search engines’ market share.
The next thing to keep in mind is that Search Engine Market Share is made up of ALL of the search engines that are “powered by” Google or Yahoo or whichever search engine you are considering. For example AOL (yes there are folks that still use them!) is “powered by Google.” That counts as part of Google’s market share.
In my opinion, there may well at some point be a good reason to do search engine optimization for both Google and Bing once Bing is powering Yahoo. It probably is not right at first, because there will be many changes and you might as well wait and see how things work out.
That said, the way to know WHEN is to watch the market share and see when that extra exposure is worth the effort to you as a REALTOR.
Bing is terrible. I tried it and was not at all impressed. I am going to ignore it for now and keep focusing on Google.
-Tyler
October 15th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Google is still the king, but with the money being spent on Bing who knows what could happen.
October 18th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Bing is slowly improving and its algorithms seem to work a lot better in terms pages that pertain to new and recent events/news stories. Google is still on top, and I haven’t found a use for Yahoo yet.
October 18th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
My website has dropped dramatically in the google serps – went from page 2 to like page 9 or more for the keywords ‘las vegas foreclosures’. On the other hand, I have been creeping up a few pages on bing. I’m kinda hoping bing succeeds so that newer websites have a better chance where in google competition is tough.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:43 am
These two have a long way to go and I will just sit and watch rather than try to figure them out.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:21 am
I think most people doing SEO just focus on one of the search engines at a time. I have been so focused on Google that I haven’t paid much attention to the other SERPS. I think because Google is so dominate and there are so many SEO tools developed for Google, that most people focus on this serch engine.
October 29th, 2009 at 4:27 am
Google may have been the focus of much SEO and good strategy some years back but now, according to various “top sites” webmaster tools, traffic to the top sites was coming directly from MSN and Yahoo.
October 30th, 2009 at 2:23 pm