Many of our blog posts come from real world experiences with our clients, and todays blog post is a common question we are asked and sometimes told. Is Google the only search engine I need to care about?
While I could sit here and give you a stat of how many users use Google vs other search engines, we all realistaclly know the majority of the population prefer Google above Yahoo and NineMsn.
When we first start SEO on a website we notice that Ninemsn and Yahoo will index the changes and rank the site (hopefully higher) a lot sooner than Google. Now I could try and explain why Google takes longer than any other search engine to display your higher ranked pages but I will leave that argument/discussion for another time.
In TopRankings eyes we target you for all 3 search engines (not necessarily equally). So why do we do this? Let me explain!!!
When you purchase your shiny new PC and turn it on and goto Internet Explorer what is the 1st site that usually appears? It is usually NineMSN (Channel Nine and Microsoft collaboration web portal/search engine). Would you believe their are many users that dont know how to change the default page so they keep Ninemsn running as the default and thus this is usually the search engine they primarily use. Some users simply prefer Yahoo over Google, after all Yahoo supplies the users with an abundance of information (yes Google can but once again some users dont know how to enable this feature).
We use the rankings we have achieved for you in Yahoo and Ninemsn as a guide, if we have achieved great rankings for you in these 2 search engines we can safely assume given time these results will flow thru to Google (unfortunately with Google, time is the million dollar question). We personally have noticed it can take several months for the changes to appear where Yahoo and Ninemsn is usually days/weeks NOT months.
So in summary their are definetly users who use other search engines than Google. Why wouldnt you want to target these users as well?
Judging success of SEO shouldnt be simply based on what position you are in Google what really matters is how much bigger is your wallet getting? I personally dont care if I am #1 or #3 or what search engines I am top results for as I try and be top for all search engines and not just one. What really matters to me is how many people found me on the web and if I have converted them as a client? And then I always ask myself this question, if I didnt SEO my site would the client ever would of known I existed? If the answer is NO then SEO is working for me regardless of the search engine and/or my ranking.
