I keep reading alot of post pertaining to Google and SEO. Is anyone out there aware that Google is not the only search engine?
Has anyone heard of Yahoo? How about MSN? Netscape (time warner)...there's a new one. Jeeves may be gone but the Ask.com part remains.
All of the meta tags are great to have on Google as it is probably the largest search engine, but what about all of the rest? According to statistics (click here to see the results) Google gets the lion's share of internet searches by capturing nearly 50% of all searches in the US. That is 50% of 7.3 billion searches a MONTH...not yearly, monthly!!! So Google accounts for 3.6 Billion of the searches performed in the US which is why it makes sense to spend your money with Google, but you shouldn't ignore all of the other search engines....specifically Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo gets 25% of all searches in the US giving them almost 2 billion searches a month. Annually that is 24 Billion searches. MSN is a bit smaller but still enough of a force to garner 8 Billion searches a year!
My point is if you only focus on Google, while you certainly will be part of the 43 Billion searches each year, there are another 43 Billion searches that may or may not find you.
To make matters even more complicated....just because people are searching for real estate doesn't mean they are doing it the same. I asked 10 people to write down 10 internet phrases they would type in a search engine to find real estate in Los Angeles. There were alot of different ideas such as LA Homes, LA Houses, Los Angeles, CA Real Estate, Los Angeles, California Real Estate. All of these different ways to search will bring back different numbers of returns. There was only one specific phrase that all 10 people had. The phrase was Los Angeles Real Estate. 10 pople all searching for the same thing only agreed to search the same way 10% of the time??? No wonder our divorce rate is so high....no one understands what the other person is trying to say!!!
For fun I did a little exercise. I picked three towns that I have lived in in my life time. I searched Ocala, FL, Virginia Beach, VA, and Ventura, CA. I searched the same phrase as the 10 people all agreed on but subsituted my home town names. I did this on four search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Netscape. The next parts you can scan over and read below for the point I am trying to make.
Here are the results for a general search (non specific):
Ocala Real Estate
- Google: 1.36 million results
- Yahoo: 1.24 million results
- MSN: 268,000 results
- Netscape 143000 results
Virginia Beach Real Estate
- Google: 3.48 million results
- Yahoo 8.06 million results
- MSN: 137,000 results
- Netscape: 370,000 results
Ventura Real Estate
- Google: 1.17 million results
- Yahoo: 3.71 million results
- MSN: 414,000 results
- Netscape: 126,000 results
I know that typing in Ventura Real Estate is a pretty broad search and will return things that have nothing to do with real estate so I decided to do an specific search. You can do a specific search by clicking on Advance Search and selecting only specific phrases, or you can simply put quotation marks around your search phrase.
I did the same search again with the following results:
"Ocala Real Estate"
- Google: 70,000 results
- Yahoo: 126,000 results
- MSN: 23,500 results
- Netscape 7700 results
"Virginia Beach Real Estate"
- Google: 209,000 results
- Yahoo 137,000 results
- MSN: 53,700 results
- Netscape: 23,000 results
"Ventura Real Estate"
- Google: 44,900 results
- Yahoo: 36,900 results
- MSN: 19,000 results
- Netscape: 4970 results
Actual returns on pages are different than results. Were there actually 70,000 different websites that I could visit to check out Ocala Real Estate? No. In fact when you look at the actual results the numbers are dramatically different than what is initially indicated. I only did this for research on Google but here are the actual returns on a specific search:
- Ocala - 643 Actual Results
- Virginia Beach - 581 Actual Results
- Ventura - 511 Actual Results
(So if I am an agent in Ocala, I only have to outfox 642 other agents or entities to top the Google listings. Good Luck with that.) The problem with the actual results is that (in Ocala) if each results page contains 10 results, I would have to look through 65 different page results to see everyones website! Who goes past the first three or four pages these days?
If you look at these results you realize that the results are much different for each search engine. Even though we are all using the same Internet, we all have different means of searching it. Additionally the results are constantly changing. The internet is very broad and very general. We can hope through SEO that we can funnel our fair share of clients to our website, but how many clients can't find you in spite of your efforts?
Point and Click access to your website is the wave of the future. Wether that be passing out electronic CD business cards, using v-fliers, or CurbSide CDs. The name of the game is to get people to find you, and find you before they find someone else. There are plenty of solutions out there and plenty of people willing to outspend you to be on the top. What happens when everyone masters SEO? Then it is going to be who pays the most per click???
Do your own research on the town you live in on all of the different search engines....where do you rank on each one? Once your head is done spinning, you may want to consider alternative means to drive people to your website.
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