Google is by far the best search engine on the market today. And from an SEO perspective, Google is the only search engine that matters. Especially when considering which search engine can deliver the most results as efficiently and effectively as possible. Let me explain by sharing a story.
In September 2009, my family and I spent a couple weeks in Disney World. It was a great trip. And during our stay, I got to do something I rarely get to do in the real world...read the USA Today nearly every morning. It was heavenly. So while my daughter played in the toddler pool nearby, I got to read the Money section. And one day, the Money section included an interview with the CEO of Yahoo! He explained that the company's strategy over the course of the next 18-months was to invest $100 million in advertising to rebuild the Yahoo! brand and recapture some of its lost share in the search engine market. Huh? Yes, the company had announced plans to aggressively advertise what seemed to be a broken model in order to regain its market position. When I read that interview, I thought Yahoo! had even further lost its direction. In all actuality, Yahoo! had lost its focus years earlier when it had begun to morph into more of a media company instead of being one of the best search engines. So, I was left sort of scratching my head at their strategy in moving forward.
Then the very next morning I was again reading the Money section. I sort of felt like I was reliving the previous day inside the movie Groundhog Day because I sat down in the same seat by the pool, drinking another cup of Disney coffee, watched my daughter splash around in the toddler pool, and then I opened the Money section. And this time, there was an interview with the CEO of Google. How coincidental is that? Interviews with search engine CEOs two days in a row? Google's CEO told USA Today that the company believed the economy was near the bottom of the recession and indicators seemed to be pointing toward a recovery. So Google's strategy in moving forward would be to acquire at least one company each month for the foreseeable future. Yep, the company was committed to becoming even better! Impressive.
I quickly flashed back to the Yahoo! interview from the day before. Let's see...the company with a broken business model (Yahoo!) decides to advertise more often instead of fixing its model...then the best search engine on the planet (Google) decides to continue spending zero dollars on advertising and embarks on a mission to acquire one company every month for the foreseeable future in an effort to improve its business model. Fast forwarding to present day...Google purchased four social networking companies during August 2010 alone. Yes, four social networking companies! Google had found a way to further improve.
I suspect that Google's appetite for buying social networking companies is likely the result of the overlap between social and SEO. By overlap I mean that your social networking activities can benefit your SEO efforts and vice versa. The overlap between social networking and SEO is so significant and will become even more apparent in 2011 when the emphasis once again shifts toward the need for high quality content.
Google is so dominant largely due to its mission in life of indexing every page of content in the world. And Google is well on its way to accomplishing that goal.
Google market share remains staggering...even with Bing-Yahoo as strong as they are. Google still owns over 65 percent of the market whereas Bing-Yahoo represent less than 30 percent. The business owners who attend my search engine optimization often ask me if Bing will hurt Google. My answer has been, and will continue to be, no. When Microsoft introduced Bing into the market, I began telling people that Bing would put Yahoo! in its grave. And that is essentially what happened in August this year. Now all search results provided by Yahoo! are powered by Bing. For all practical purposes, there are essentially two search engines...Google and Bing...and Google remains the best.
Given Google's market-share dominance in search, I specifically designed my 15-step SEO process to give small business owners the tools they needed in order to score Top 10 rankings in Google. By following some simple math, you can quickly calculate the dollar value of a number ranking in Google.
Ultimately, you will save time by optimizing your Website content according to what works with Google. Plus, your site will not only rank well in Google, but you will likely rank well in Bing, too. Because of this, from a search engine optimization perspective, Google is the only search engine that matters.
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