Most online marketeers focus on optimising their websites for Google, but why? and how has Google become so popular?
Google’s growth and success centred around delivering the most relevant results from its users’ searches. Many search engines before 1995 used to just compare a user’s search term to their own databases of terms, and pages that had text most similar to the search term were considered more relevant and so appeared higher in the search results. However the results displayed weren’t always the most logical, with searches for “Microsoft” displaying Microsoft products before Microsoft’s own website.
Other than returning more relevant search results to users, Google also focused on making a faster, less cluttered results page which users preferred.
As the years went on Google continued to add features and services to its offerings:
2000 – Google AdWords launches
2001 – Google Images launches
2004 – Acquire Keyhole later to become Google Earth
2005 – Google Maps goes live
2005 – Google Mobile Web Search released, specially formulated for viewing search results on mobile phones
2005 – Google Analytics released
2006 – Google acquire YouTube
2007 – Google Street View
2009 – Introduced DoubleClick Ad Exchange
2010 – Google Instant – showing search results as you type so you can quickly get the information you’re looking for.
2011 – Launch Google+ Pages
A recent report by comScore shows that in February 64.5% of searches were carried out on Google, with only 19.8% carried out on Bing and 12.8% on Yahoo. Given that Google have a huge market share it makes sense to focus on optimising websites for this search engine, and you can pretty much be certain that nowadays if you are within the top of the search results in Google you will most likely be within the top of the search results in other search engines as well.
If you are interested in knowing about the SEO (search engine optimisation) services we provide, please feel free to give us a call on 01202 677277.