On a busy Wednesday with the threatening promise of more travel just around the corner, I need to write a good short post and move on to other pressing work. That’s why I wanted to write about the basic venues. That thought was a big mistake in my own time management…
I had intended to write a short piece on the most basic organic spaces or venues where SEO services could or should be applied. As the search market slowly diversifies, SEOs have to prioritize their efforts to get maximum bang for their clients’ or employer’s buck.
Wanting to move quickly, I copied Nielsen/NetRatings’ list of the ten search providers for July 2007. Predictably, it starts with the most basically complicated venue of all, Google. That’s when I started to think and to realize the enormity of my early morning mistake.
If my first mistake was making the list, my second was stopping to think about it. There isn’t anything basic about any of the basic venues. Each is more of a multiplex than single theater. Pressing forward, here is the quick breakdown of top five search providers with their percentage share of total searches conducted.
Google 53.3% / Yahoo! 20.1% / MSN 13.6% / AOL 5.2% / ASK 1.8%
It is important to note that AOL is fed by Google and produces virtually duplicate results. With AOL’s share folded in, Google’s reach extends to 58.5% of search results seen by viewers. That’s a fairly significant distinction considering the size of AOL’s network. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, AOL served up over 407,988,000 search results in July 2007.
In a series starting today, we’re going to try to look under the hood of each of these five “basic†venues to see where there is to be seen. Each presents a number of search marketing opportunities and possibilities.
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