A quick update on the UK popularity of each of the major search engines for the last 12 months.

No prizes for guessing the leader; Google is still hugely dominant with over 90% of market share. Bing & Yahoo make a notable contribution with just over roughly 3% each, leaving the other two major search engines, AOL & Ask, trailing with less than 1% each. These of course all still way ahead of all other search engine brands, which combined only account for less than 0.2% of this year’s market share. When you consider just how many are included in this bracket, the significance of these results really starts to sink in – remember Lycos, AltaVista or MSN search? All have practically sunk without trace, scary stuff.

 

So what does this mean for your marketing? Well, if you’re not advertising on Google, you should be. Whether you like it or not, Google has total dominance in the Search market. It’s been reported that globally Google receives over 1 billion monthly unique visitors, that’s huge – it equates to approximately 1 in 7 people around the world visiting Google each month. To see just how popular Google is, use the below link to see a great 3D representation of the number searches around the globe – it’s something to behold:

click here >> Google Search Globe << click here

 

To find out more about Search Engine Marketing, click here, or alternatively give us a call on 0845 275 1225.

 

Sources: StatCounter.com, SearchEngineWatch.com, ComScore.com, Google Trends

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Google has announced on their recently created search blog that more images are to be shown for certain queries in the main search engine results pages. You’ve probably noticed images showing up in normal search results before, but now Google are going to show more, pushing normal results further down the page. They say that “if we detect that your query has “high image intent” (meaning, we’re pretty sure you’re looking for images) we’ll start showing more images on the page.” A good guide is that if you include ‘pictures’, ‘images’, ‘pics’ etc. in you search query, you are likely to see more than the standard 3 or 4 images.

So far, the change has only been implemented on Google.com – but as with many changes Google make, it’s likely they will roll it out on Google.co.uk (along with other variants) too. See below for a screenshot of what the new results look like:

With more images being shown in normal results, it’s never been more important to optimise your images perfectly for the search engines. The new change means that you can beat the top ranked normal listing for a given query, simply by making what may only be a few changes to an image on your site. If you were to do this for all images on your site – the increase in traffic could be substantial.

Image optimisation is just one of the many areas that our SEO service covers. Visit our SEO page for more information or request a free SEO audit of your site today!

 

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