All search engines are important to your website

If you are looking for a local shoe shop online, which search engine do you use? Whose search engine bar do you type into if you’re looking for a cheap holiday to France? More often than not, the answer to these questions will be “Google”.

And who would blame you as Google completely dominates today’s search engine market. Back in the day, search engines were set up left, right and centre, but they often failed due to various reasons; Viewzi, LeapFish and the more recent, Cuil are to name but a few.

Google entirely dominates the market nowadays, leaving other search engines struggling to make an impact on the market. Some hold onto a small part of it such as the Microsoft-owned search engine, Bing (formerly known as MSN Search) and Yahoo!, but in contrast to Google’s mammoth market share, they barely compare.

If you have a business and you have decided that your website requires more traffic, there are two things you could do. The first method is to invest in Google AdWords - whereby your website is displayed on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - but you pay them a sum of money for every click you receive; this is called Pay Per Click (PPC).

Practising Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the other process. This is the method of turning your website into a page that is both attractive and noticeable to anyone who is looking for the exact services you have to offer, as well as ensuring it is easily readable by search engines.

Ultimately, the aim of SEO is to have your website ranking higher on SERPs. Both SEO and PPC can be done by you, but both can be a time consuming process. There are various SEO agencies available to help you with these aspects of promoting your website.

Lately Google has been at the wrong end of some bad press and the public’s faith in them is beginning to waiver. Do their recent antics mean that Google’s place at the top of the tree is threatened?

If this is the case, it is likely that other search engines will be quick to capitalise, with Bing being in the best position. Don’t forget how young Bing is. It was only launched in 2009, yet since then it has achieved a high status and is regularly spoken of in the same breath as Google; that is fairly impressive for something so young.

Where Bing is responsible for only 4% of all search engine traffic in the UK, Google is accountable for an outstanding 91%. In the US however, Bing is responsible for approximately 15% of all traffic, proving that it deserves its high status within the search engine world.

You have put hard work into your website, making sure that it falls in line with Google’s numerous rules and requirements; so what will happen to it if Google’s position is threatened?

There are many SEO agencies out there that appreciate the significance of cross-platform optimisation. They will keep a careful eye on the progression of your website on other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing, as well as optimising your site to achieve better results of Google’s SERPs.