The Truth About Search Engines Today

The above image shows website traffic from one of our clients for this past week.

When I work with small business owners, I often politely use the phrase “Search Engines” when talking about website rankings and potential visitors “from search”. This is politically correct, of course, because there are many search engines. The truth for EVERY business I speak with is that almost ALL search traffic will come from Google. Period.

While it’s nice to have a Bing Local business listing and it’s really lovely that Bing exists, Bing will not drive traffic resulting in an measurable effect on sales, revenue or profits for any small local business. Earlier this week I was speaking on the phone with a client and together we did a few searches together. Then he said, “Wait a minute! For some reason I’m on Bing! That’s why I’m seeing different results. How did that happen?” It was his computer somehow defaulting to Bing for searches, despite his intentions to conduct a real search on Google. Has this ever happened to you? (could that be most of the 2% of searches in the above image?)

This may sound harsh but I’ve been saying this for many years: Keep your focus on Google. Focus your efforts to rank well and capture potential new business from people using Google to find what you offer. It’s perfectly fine to ignore Bing. Bing a non-factor. Yahoo is a carcass along the side of the road. Ignore Yahoo. Spend your time making sure your Google listing is awesome and your website informs Google very explicitly what you offer and where you offer it. Focus on those things and you’ll score 96% out of 100.

Okay so now get to work!