Google continues to be the dominating force in search technology. Last year alone, it fielded 1.2 trillion queries, according to WebpageFX. As a result of its leadership, marketers have become experts in the company’s SEO guidelines and wait with bated breath for updates from the Google team, so they can stay one step ahead of internet marketing trends.
However, the latest search engine ranking data from comScore indicates brands shouldn’t ignore Bing and Yahoo in their quests to earn page one positions on Google SERPs. The April 2013 comScore Search analysis revealed that Google saw a slight dip in market share, accounting for 66.5 percent of total searches. In March 2013, it held 67.1 percent of the market.
Where are those slivers of search going? Bing enjoyed a healthier performance in April, increasing its share by 0.4 percent month-over-month to reach 17.3 percent of the industry total. Yahoo sites also benefited from a slight boost that pushed its portion up to 12 percent from last month’s 11.8 percent.
This slow, but upward trend for Google’s competitors should plant the seed that marketers might also need to consider SEO for Microsoft’s search technology in the future. For the meantime, Google continues to win the hearts and clicks of internet users. Brafton previously reported that a survey proved people prefer Google’s search results, even in blind A/B tests.
Google saw a slight dip in market share, accounting for 66.5 percent of total searches in April 2013.
While marketers wait and see if Google remains unchallenged in coming years, they can take steps to safeguard search results. Crawlers look for website content that’s original and interesting. Creating a content marketing strategy that builds brand authority and provides site visitors with interesting articles will help businesses perform well in organic search results, no matter which engine consumers use for research purposes.
