Why do you use one search engine over another? Is it by chance, by choice or do you change on a regular basis?

In 2008, Google reported a turnover of £2 billion generated purely from clicks on Adwords adverts, but what about Bing and Yahoo?

The graph below is fascinating. It shows search engine usage according to how technologically advanced the user is. There’s no surprise that Google wins the ‘Middle Majority’ with a greater overall percentage, but Bing and Yahoo are also leaders amongst certain other demographics.

So when you are developing your online advertising strategy it’s important to understand your audience; how and where they search. Different searchers (and therefore search engines) have different characteristics that will benefit some brands more than others.

Every search engine displays different results, some more relevant than others, but all with the goal of satisfying consumer needs. If it achieves this than that search engine has a greater appeal to that particular customer, leading to a longer relationship. Some search engines will do this better than others depending on what they are looking for.

It’s pretty easy to look at the impact of this on your bottom line too. Looking at your web analytics, you can see whether traffic from certain search engines actually converts at a better rate than others. For example, a client of ours receives only 1% of web traffic from Bing and Yahoo, but the conversion rate from these is 42%, a whole 131% better than the site’s average conversion rate. What does this tell us about users of Bing and Yahoo? Are people that use these search engines more likely to buy from our client?

So before committing online spend, it is worth spending some time properly understanding your prospects in order to spend your money wisely. If you want a bit of a helping hand, get in touch with the guys at dotSEO who will be happy to assist!

We’re all inundated with wonderful and often colourful spam. So I decided to take a closer look to see if any mileage could be gained by giving a random SEO spam email a chance. It hit my inbox yesterday.

Initially I was asked, “Does your site rank low? Is it optimized?” And of course, “Are you aware that we have a 98.95% success rate in achieving top page rankings?” Answers: “No”, “No” and “No”. So let’s get cracking…

With no company name anywhere in the email, and a salutation that just said “Dear Sir/Madam”, the only reference I had to anything resembling a company was the return path which pointed to an internet data centre in India. I responded highlighting my interest and asking for additional information.

Within 10 minutes I had my response, details of the company and a name of the person who contacted me. Not bad.

Then came what I’ll call THE FLOOD.

I was bombarded with facts, figures and hooks to try to capture my attention. I was told they were a company of significant reputation, 75 staff and a successful track record of providing up to 5,000 natural links every month. Top 10 rankings would be achieved in the first 6 months and best of all, my traffic was going to grow by 120% in 26 weeks! Supporting this was the fact they had over 240 clients in the USA and UK. Brilliant. The email directed me to their website which presented 65 task options for SEO (all practical and required for rankings). Sadly, to the uninitiated, this could look impressive, and the prices, amazing!

Too good to be true! Where do I sign?

Not just yet… I asked for proof of rankings and some client examples and I was returned a spreadsheet showing terms, rankings and clients’ websites.

Not surprisingly, these websites were obscure and in one case redirected from an international top level domain to an Indian domain name of a completely different company. Despite the spreadsheet rankings being accurate, the terms in many cases had limited or no search volume. Few sites had any contact information so I had no way to check if these companies even used the one in question. The one with contact information I tried to call but couldn’t be connected.

Ignoring these obvious warning signs, I emailed back and asked how long my NEW site would take to rank for the terms ‘camera’ and ‘digital camera’. These are searched for 368,000 and 450,000 times a month respectively in the UK. To their credit they came back and said “these could take some time to rank.” Some time? Correct! Probably an infinite amount of time!

The lesson here is to be careful that you check how long your own competitive terms will take to rank, rather than simply absorbing at face value a term that you are provided. These terms could be branded, non-competitive or have no search volume. Rankings can look impressive but they will do little for your ROI.

Now the implosion:

It is always a good test of quality to assess the SEO of an SEO agency – ie the company’s own website. If they can rank and perform well themselves, the likelihood is that they can do it for you. Our critique on the site in question found that not one of their own terms ranked in the Top 100 of Google in the UK, USA or India, and the site failed miserably across every SEO check and lacked the most basic on & off-site elements for any site. They also had no Page Rank.

Google’s Page Rank is the premise for Google rankings. Page Rank is a measure of strength, authority and relevancy and is scored between 0 to 10.  A new site or site that can’t be indexed is often referred to as un-ranked. To check a site’s Page Rank yourself, download the Google Toolbar and hover over this symbol.

Now don’t forget those links; they promised me 5000 natural links a month, but like the other checks we performed we found that their own site had under 20 links! These had no anchor text, their primary source quality was horrendous, and many were simply broken. Would I want them link building for me? No way! If they can’t do it for themselves the likelihood of them doing it for you is slim at best.

As for their 75 staff, their Facebook page had a grand total of 1 employee!

So all in all my response has to be: “Dear Sir/Madam… your email has been deleted.”

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been making the headlines himself recently by revealing plans to de-index his news websites from Google, when they start charging for access to online content.

This follows a long running spat between media publishers and the world’s leading search engine. On the one hand, Google drives substantial traffic to news websites. However, publishers are frustrated by the editorial power that Google is able to wield through its Google News service – power that traditionally resided with publisher/newspaper. They also claim that Google is in breach of copyright by publishing news from their websites in its index.

The counter-argument has always been that if newspaper sites are so annoyed by Google’s actions, then they should just block the search engine from indexing the site. Murdoch seems to finally be putting his money (or traffic) where his mouth is.

The Belgian ruling

Back in 2007, a group of Belgian newspapers successfully sued Google for copyright infringements. And now, Murdoch is hoping to get one over on Google by taking back the power in the battle for online news.

Recent reports have suggested that after removing news from Google, Murdoch will seek to secure a deal with new Microsoft search engine Bing. So how would this affect the balance of power in the search engine war?

How do we search for news?

If we imagine a situation where Bing managed to achieve exclusive access to most of the world’s major news feeds, it’s interesting to consider how that would affect the way we search for news and the way we use search engines in general.

We are used to being able to access anything from any search engine, so would closing off content reduce our reliance on Google et al as the fount of all knowledge?

Even if this did happen (and I think it would be hard for Bing to get ubiquitous control of the news space), Google has such a stranglehold on our online searching that, even if they lost the news battle, they would still be used for our everyday searching needs.

That said, we could see a split in the search market, where if you wanted to search for news, then Bing would be the engine of choice, whereas for everyday surfing needs, Google would still retain its dominance.

It’s safe to say that this battle is only just beginning; it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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