When we hear the words ‘search engine optimisation’ or read an article based on how to improve your organic search engine results, more often than not, people use SEO and Google interchangeably. Many of the articles we read about optimising website search rankings are aimed at Google’s search algorithm, but rarely do we hear about Yahoo or Bing. Less than this AOL and other search engines are almost never mentioned.
In nearly all English-speaking countries Google is the dominant search engine. Yahoo is bigger than Google in some countries, but these are places like Japan and so we almost never search and read an article written in Japanese on how to become a Yahoo SEO guru.
It is interesting to read the 2018 search engine stats in which Google dominated the 2017 organic search market across the globe with 74.54% of searches made using Google’s search engine. It does not come as a surprise to be honest because most of the time the results that Yahoo and Bing bring up are confusing it almost feels as if this both these search engines are being extremely lazy when it comes to improving their algorithms.
On the other hand, although it annoys a lot of SEOs, the Google team are always bringing out new algorithms as well as updating their existing ones to make sure their results are competitive. However, if Yahoo and Bing are so bad, who is it exactly that Google is competing with?
Social Media is the answer. Facebook and Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, have been stealing searches away from Google. This is because social media tends to have a much better system when it comes to reviews and endorsements. i.e. they have business pages with reviews on them, the number of likes and followers gives consumers a much better idea of how popular the company is.
Schema for Google is The Answer
To fight back against Social Media’s huge advantage of being able to provide people that use their networks with facilities that allow their business to take advantage of endorsements, Google now insists that all websites make use of schema. Now schema is mostly used to help Google see how a website’s structure is organised.
Though it also gives the website owner the ability to use snippets that show company reviews, and there is a system that shows gold star ratings on the search results. This is also a multi-language tool so if you are in Holland and your website ranks for the keyword hoog in google, then your website will show up with a gold star rating for the reviews people have left about your company.
Neither Bing or Yahoo appears to be making the effort that Google is to stay in competition with social media. Now when we search on Google, we can even see the ratings a website has been given so we have an indication of how trustworthy it is. Unfortunately, Google Plus is now dead. It used to be the main tool that helped people gain endorsements for their business via Google, so now that is gone, we have to rely on schema and the system Google is using now.
One thing is for sure, the more Google keeps trying to keep its algorithms up to date, the more successful the search engine will become. It is already the dominant force far ahead of Yahoo and Bong, hence Google attracts so many searches. To be absolutely honest, Yahoo and Bing are not the reasons why Google are adjusting so much either because both search engines are so far behind Google, it is the Social Media giants that Google is competing with.
With Bing and Yahoo’s lack of effort to fight against social media giants, both search engines are falling behind and their reliance on being great places to get the latest news reports has proven to be a failed attempt to capture more organic searches. I am afraid that both Bing and Yahoo are guilty of being too complacent.
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