Nielsen Online just released data regarding search engine traffic and the information is quite interesting. From March 2008 through March 2009 overall search engine traffic is up by nearly 17%. That’s a big number and ties in with other findings suggesting that search engines are quickly replacing the Yellow Pages when people want to connect with businesses.
Both Google and Yahoo saw growth but Google is still the dominant force in search with over 64% of the market share and roughly 28% year-over-year growth. Yahoo is in second place with almost 16% market share and roughly 2% growth.
In fact, if you add up Google, Yahoo, MSN /Live, AOL, and Ask -these five sites represent about 96% of all search engine traffic.
By comparison, all combined Yellow Pages online search engines (such as DEX) account for just 0.4% of all search requests.
Given this information:
- Avoid paying extra fees in Yellow Page advertising for insertion into their search engines -as there simply isn’t a significant value in potential results.
- Avoid using one of the so-called search engine optimization experts that will place you into “thousands” of websites. These are of little to now value.
- Be careful about using advertising dollars in search engines that have little to no traffic. Pay-per-click advertising should be concentrated in Google and then Yahoo.
Our conclusion: A properly constructed search engine strategy will concentrate on the top 5 search engines and that is it.
Here are the full year-over-year stats from Nielsen:
| Provider | Searches (000) | YOY Growth | Share of Searches |
| All Search | 9.522,853 | 16.7% | 100.0% |
| 6,113,906 | 27.6% | 64.2% | |
| Yahoo! | 1,505,426 | 1.7% | 15.8% |
| MSN /Windows Live | 982,661 | 0.3% | 10.3% |
| AOL | 356,569 | 6.6% | 3.7% |
| Ask | 197,957 | -0.7% | 2.1% |
| My Web | 59,597 | -15.1% | 0.6% |
| Comcast | 57,605 | 30.2% | 0.6% |
| Yellow Pages (all) | 37,295 | N/A | 0.4% |
| NexTag | 22,432 | -23.7% | 0.2% |
| Dogpile | 19,461 | 0.7% | 0.2% |
