Internet Marketing: A Change to Natural Searches
A whole year behind the US and Canada finally the UK and Europe will see natural search change. Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance will come into effect this will mean that natural search results normally delivered at uk.Yahoo.com will now be taken from Bing.co.uk’s search index instead.
However, any paid ads which were on Yahoo will not yet switch over but they will continue to be served via their own Yahoo! Search Marketing for now. Although Brick technology web design and other search marketers have known about this change since Yahoo and Microsoft discussed a merge in 2006 it was not until February 2010 that this was made official.
The UK and Europe have had to wait a whole year longer than the US and Canada who saw their natural and paid results changed in August 2010. Ultimately when Brick technology web design invite our clients to their internet marketing meetings and we look at various analytics we will have one less set of natural search results to show them.
Changing this over will also mean that we should start to see a change in traffic levels over the next few weeks although this could be fairly small because Yahoo! on average only deliver around 5% of total natural search traffic.
This is compared to the 80-90% which is delivered by search engine giant Google. Although this is a small percent if you have millions upon millions of visitors then this could end up accounting for a hefty amount in some cases.
For websites like those of our clients at Brick technology that are already performing well on Bing then you will start to see a boost in traffic over the next few days.
As the change is in its early stages the best thing to do is to compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for your targeted keywords that drive your business and then use these comparisons to try and work out any potential impact to traffic, conversions and ultimately your sales.
Make sure that you take a book at the Bing Webmaster Tools and ensure that your web design is optimised for the robot or Bing crawler to index your pages within the Yahoo! and Bing organic search results.
Brick technology has a dedicated internet marketing team who are highly experienced within SEO. They stay ahead of all the changes which are occurring to ensure that your website remains visible within search engine results for your targeted keywords.