Many times I find clients fixate on optimizing for Google. Sometimes, it seems like people treat it as the holy grail for search engines. Granted, it is difficult to get into top results on Google quickly for reasonably competitive key terms but it is not the only search engine that people use.
Take the British for example. In a study conducted by Harvest Digital, Pandia reports:
…only 24 percent of British searchers use only one search engine.
Surprisingly as many as 20 percent use four or more search engines. Only 22 percent reports that one search engine can supply all the information they need.
There are many searchers who search using AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask as primary search engines as well. Taking into account the overall traffic total from all these people for the key terms in other search engines, in many cases, the number of potential visitors is much greater than simply focusing on G alone. These people my also be more likely to purchase.
So don’t discount traffic just because it comes from another search engine. You’ll find your pockets a little fuller when you rank well across the major search engines…