Where do you think your customers are searching E-Local? or GOOGLE, YaHoo, MSN, ASK, etc.?
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories.
Google accounts for over 64% of ALL searches in the US.
Yahoo 22%
MSN 9%
ASK 3%
48 other search engines accounted for less than 5 percent of U.S. searches.
Googles growth shows no signs of slowing. Despite capturing the majority of searches in the U.S., and in light of competitor's improvements, Google's market share of executed searches continues to grow, exceeding 10 percent growth year after year.
Spend your Internet Marketing Budget positioning your company on these major search engines, where your potential customers are actually looking for you. Standard search engines are increasingly the starting point for local searches, underscoring the importance of SEO and inclusion in these search engines for small businesses.
E-Local, YellowPages.com, YP.com, or YellowBook.com are all just Internet directories where you pay to be listed. There are situations where a listing on one or more of these pay directory sites would be beneficial to your company, but only as part of an overall Internet Marketing Plan, not recommended as the main or only strategy. In contrast, the largest source of traffic for "yellow pages sites" is largely from navigational terms (ie, 'yellow pages') used at the major search engines. The market share of US visits to the top 5 yellow pages sites has reportedly declined by 7%.
Our carpet cleaning company gains A LOT of great new customers from our Internet presence. We also get price shoppers, but those that are not a good match for our company, we refer to local cleaners who are our friends. We have also reworked our site a few times to reduce the number of inquires from price shoppers.
