As you know, Google is the king in terms of the search engines but some of the other guys have made some gains. In its January 2012 U.S. search engine rankings report, market research firm comScore found that Google has reassumed control of two-thirds of the search marketing, gaining 0.3 percent in the month. More than 66 percent of search queries in January were conducted on Google, compared to 15.2 percent for Bing and 14.1 percent on Yahoo.
Ask.com also saw some minor gains, moving from 2.9 percent to 3 percent of the market. AOL landed fifth, remaining at 1.6 percent from the previous month’s report market share.
As searchers are getting their holiday shopping out of their system, searches as a whole fell in January as it does most years. Brafton recently reported that Americans spent more than $50 billion online in December, further signaling the value of cross-engine SEO in terms of catching clicks and cash from searchers.
Even though the other search engines did gain some market share, it has done little to cut into Google’s lead. SEO campaigns should still focus on Google users as the company strives to create the best possible search experience – even if the strong January performance for Google and Bing set up an interesting battle between the companies.
We all know it is unlikely that Google is going to get removed from its pedestal anytime soon, but Microsoft’s has made it their mission to fight against Google has hard as it can and this has already manifested itself with two different actions. First, Google’s new privacy policy compelled Microsoft to release a marketing campaign aimed at alerting users to what the policy could mean for them. Additionally, Bing has adjusted its SERPs (search engine ranking positions), which now look very similar to Google’s, to appeal to those users trying a new search engine.
The post January 2012 U.S. Search Engine Ranking Report appeared first on .