Search Engine Market Share – Some of the team (including oneself!!) were at a recent digital marketing information session for small business owners in Dublin City Centre. Companies and owners that had recognised that they needed to address their digital marketing activity. It was only four hours in duration and the audience were encouraged to ask questions throughout the presentation. However, there was one particular issue that really annoyed me, the presenter was promoting the Google search engine like it was his child! OK, Google do hold a strong search engine market share in Ireland, but this presentation was for companies hoping to expand and trade outside Ireland…..What market share have Google got in France? Don’t ask me!!!
Let’s have a look at the search engine market share stats for Ireland considering the presentation was held in the Emerald Isle.
Well, Google is the king maker, they have Xerox’ed the Irish population into say: ‘Google it’. And fair play to them, people in Ireland don’t seem to realise that there is more than one search engine! According to StatCounter.com in 2016, Google had a 95% search engine market share in Ireland, Bing almost 3%, Yahoo 2%, etc. According to Microsoft, they claim that Bing and Yahoo have an 8% share of the search engine market share in Ireland, which is 16m searches per month, not be ignored. In fact, Bing and Yahoo have a 22% share of the search engine market in Britain, almost 20% in Norway and France and a 33% market share in the US.
We believe if alternative search engines get their act together regarding more localised search results, they should eat into Google’s prominence in western Europe. Google have certainly produced an amazing product, understand and deliver for their customers very well. Google Maps and Google Plus have really given them the edge (excuse the pun!) on their competitors along with their capacity to feed better ‘location’ and ‘local’ based search engine results. Others search engines have work to do, however, even today for advertisers and business owners, alternative search engines to Google should not be ignored, even if their market share is below ten per cent.
At DigitalSales.com we believe you can achieve great returns and organic SEO positives by using alternative search engines for advertising and here’s why….
Google AdWords for some sectors has become excessively expensive, gone are the days when you could buy traffic to your website for under ten cents using AdWords. Google claim that on average with every ten clicks to your site, one becomes a new customer, we are far from convinced of this statistic (in time we will publish a report to counter this Google AdWords statistic). COST PER CLICK with Bing and Yahoo is far cheaper that Google AdWords and as a result the cost of acquisition will be cheaper. However, even if you don’t close a sale, what other advantages of using Bing and Yahoo might there be?
We believe that the greatest benefit of Advertising on Bing and Yahoo is TRAFFIC. Cheap High Value Traffic. And as you are probably aware, good traffic figures equates to better organic SEO position, in essence, you get cheap valuable traffic (do make sure you have a strong value proposition on your homepage or ad landing page in order to keep your bounce rate low). The reality is, online advertising can help your overall SEO position. Remember, organic positioned websites have a far higher conversion rate that paid position, they hold a higher trust value with online customers.
To summarise, how as marketers and sales professionals can you ignore a search engine market share that equates to 16 million searches a month? TWO: Cheaper Clicks and THREE, more traffic equates to better SEO results in the longer term.
If you are a company that needs help or wants to build and generate online sales, contact the DigitalSales.com team direct, send us a mail at: info@digitalsales.ie, see our contact us page for our office locations. We have in-depth knowledge of search engine market share both locally and internationally and we have exceptional experience using all types of Ad Exchanges.
Finally, please feel free to add to the conversation below, challenge what the team at Digital Sales are saying above……we welcome it and any tips that can add to our own knowledge base. Please add to the comments field below.
Diarmuid Haughian – Business Development Director – Digital Sales
Dip. International Selling, Cert. Digital Marketing, MSc. BITS, MA Career Guidance
