Search engine traffic is not only Google

The SEO community already knows that optimizing for MSN, Yahoo and Google all at the same time can be difficult. A sufficient budget and timeframe can indeed do the job in most cases. Google being the most difficult engine to optimize for, for many reasons but especially because filters and the famous sandbox a recent study by Nielsen/Rating reveals that the majority of searchers are using more than one engine to perform their queries.

Google is the market share dominant as of today and for the past 5 years but the study shows that 58% of its users are also repetitively using MSN search and Yahoo. The same phenomenon applies to Yahoo, a leak of 71% of its visitors and MSN search by 70%. While Google is hands down number one as far as providing traffic this is another opportunity for website owners to get a significant amount of traffic from the two other major players.

Search engine optimization specialists are often also providing web analysis to confirm their choice of keywords and performances and even though Google is the king of traffic, in most industries Yahoo and MSN search may provide enough traffic to skyrocket profits and increase its brand awareness significantly.

Webmasters and SEO should think again before optimizing a website, Google is not alone and is suffering from heavy and increasing competition for others. MSN and Yahoo do not penalize young websites by having them sandboxed for 6 to 10 months as Google does and SEO efforts can pay rapidly. Plus Google’s algorithm is changing frequently and dependence to only one source of traffic can jeopardize a business and ruin search engine optimization work for quite a few months.