Search Engine Statistics:: Google’s share dips

Although, Google continues to dominate the search market in U.S. I think there must be some alarm bells ringing in their mind. In the month of March 2010, there are atleast a couple of news pieces which won’t have brought joy to the Mountain View headquarters! Both of these studies were conducted by Experian Hitwise, a leader in online competitive intelligence services.

1. Popularity In a blog-post dated 15th March’ 10, Hitwise had talked about Facebook displacing Google as the most popular website in US with a weekly market share of 7.07% in comparison to Google’s 7.03%
2. Search Share Yesterday, in another study they announced that Google’s monthly search market share has dipped by 1%.  In other words, what it means is that for the month of March 2010, around 69.97% of US searches were conducted on Google.com. Whereas, for February 2010, it stood at 70.95%.
3. Sector wise trends: If we look at vertical searches, all is not lost for Google as they continue to rise in Automotive, Shopping and travel verticals.  The only exception is the Health sector, whereas Bing has made rapid strides.  Here is a graphic that I prepared on Hitwise study.
   

The study says, among the top three search engines, Google sent the most visits to the four categories below. Google’s percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories. Yahoo! Search saw gains in the Automotive category. Bing saw double-digit growth among three categories, including a 125 percent increase in the Health category.

Interesting times, would be equally insightful to see how the search trends for Google shape up in India.

Reference Links

1. Experience Hitewise Pree-release: Google received 70% of U.S. searches

2. Facebook Reaches Top Ranking in US (Via Hitwise Blog)

Basics of Search engine optimization (SEO)

Image by sillygwailo via Flickr

The fact that still a bulk of the audience use the INTERNET primarily to search for information, gives a fair idea about about the prominence of search engines.

I thought it would be good to take a re-look at some of the very general tips on search engine optimization/search engine visibility for businesses. With the advances in Web 2.0 (social apps), the dynamics of search engines have changed a lot but in my opinion, the plain old fact that a lot of your customers are searching for you online, still remains the same. Today, the search engine optimization activity needs to be integrated very tightly with the overall goals of your business.

SEO Definition: SEO aka Search engine optimization is a set of activities which when executed correctly, help your website to rank better for specific keyword queries on search engines.

A broader set of activities are associated with SEO (Planning, Objectives, Strategy, Execution, Metrics), but just to get started, you can break-down an SEO project into smaller parts with further diversification at subsequent stages.

Planning

What do I want from SEO

For a lot of people search engine optimization is nothing more than getting into the top ’10’ rankings on Google.This is a classic case, because ‘Rankings’ are just a part of  SEO and scaling up can be very hard for a new business during the initial stages. So before jumping on and saying, I want more traffic & higher rankings qualify your goals and try to be as clear as possible.

e.g. of a goal – I want to increase my sales leads through web-traffic. If you’re very specific, further classification would mean I want to increase my sales leads by 20% in the next 4 months.

With this as an input, you can now plan your search engine optimization activities in the appropriate direction.

‘Social Media’ search trends: Pakistan scores over India?

Google trends & Google Insights are fantastic tools available at your disposal if you want to monitor the market dynamics and observe specific trends for search terms. They give you a fair idea about what the world is searching for and across which segments.

My only problem is that I haven’t yet understood the fundamental difference/similarity between both of these. There is a school of thought which says that the results in both-cases are same and rated over a index of 0-100 and insights are just an extension of the results. This clearly signifies that search-volume index should be the same in both cases. However, this isn’t necessarily true.

This is what Google says about Insights:

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered,relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

There are different opinions which compare Google Trends &  Google Insights. Read here, here and here.

Within an expectation that you gain some clarity on these, let us now look at the search trends for ‘Social Media’. The first graphic shows global search density for ‘Social Media’ from 2004-present. Surprisingly, Kenya has search volume index of 100 followed by Jamaica at 82.

What really amazes me is that Pakistan is ahead of India with a search index of 69 in-comparison to 62. Off-course these aren’t actual numbers and secondly the graphic is from 2004 onwards.

Social Media global search trends 2004 - present

However, the scenario is very different for the current year 2009. Expectedly, US is at the top, followed by Singapore, India & Pakistan respectively. For India, this means that there have been more social-media searches this year. This also indicates the rapidly rising interest for Social media in India.

Global search trends for

I dug a little deeper India and observer the ‘social media’ search trends from 2004-onwards and for 2009 specifically. What is your take on these trends? How will these numbers change in the coming months? Will US continue to dominate search-rankings?