Here are the latest figures released on the search market from eMarketer.
Use of search increased 55% in December 2005 from 3.3 billion in December 2004. Google increased its share of the market with nearly 49% of all searches and saw it’s site search use rise by 75% compared to the year earlier. Yahoo saw it’s site search rise by 53% while MSN saw 20% more.
While Google is the leading search engine, it has lower conversion rates than other search engines according to a study done by WebSideStory. AOL Search, as it turns out, has the highest conversion rates in the industry.
“One way to explain the difference in conversion rates is demographics,” said Ali Behnam, senior digital marketing consultant for WebSideStory. “With portals rich in content and services, AOL, MSN and Yahoo may tend to appeal toward a more buyer friendly demographic. Google, meanwhile, may appeal to more browsers – those with less of an intent to buy.”
This goes back to the objectives behind search engine optimization. Many clients I’ve found just want to get to the top of Google at whatever cost but ignore actual conversion rates of their sites. When optimizing any site, quality traffic that results in sales matters. After all, SEO is meant to be a marketing investment and not an expense.