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15 ways to build search referrals

Posted by Michael Martinez on November 6, 2007 in Intermediate SEO

There are four major search engines: Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo!.

There are several good meta search engines such as Dogpile, Ixquick, MetaCrawler, and Momma.

There are second-tier search engines such as AOL, Exalead, MyWay, and MyWeb.

And there are major ISP search tools such as Bellsouth, Comcast, and SBC.

That’s 15 significant search choices for the average North American Webmaster. You cannot optimize for them all but you need to optimize for more than one of them.

1 great listing on Google can send a lot of traffic. 10 great listings on Google will send even more traffic. But what do you do when Google pulls the rug out from under you and you lose your 10 great listings on Google?

If you’re not generating search referrals from the other services, even though Google may outperform their combined total, you have nothing to fall back on when Google dumps you.

Search engine optimization is not about pleasing Google. Google, like other major search engines before it, loses and gains market share. People cannot always find what they are looking for on Google and they often turn to other search engines when they are frustrated (eMarketer takes an interesting look at “search engine fatigue”).

The four major metrics companies (Compete, comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen) do a very poor job of measuring search market share because they don’t integrate their data. They share their estimates of how long people spend on the major search sites, they share their estimates of how many queries are performed, and they share their estimates of how many unique visitors each search site receives.

But we don’t know how many search engines the average searcher visits or uses per search session. We don’t know how long they stay on any particular search service, and we don’t know how many queries they try on each search service before giving up.

Economists often criticize government unemployment estimates because such estimates don’t include discouraged workers, long-term unemployed people whose wellfare benefits have expired and who cannot or will not return to the workforce. In the United States, the real unemployment rate is often closer to 10% of our work force than 5% even though unemployment figures normally range from about 4% to 6%.

The discrepancy between reported unemployed workers and actual unemployed workers represents a workforce elasticity that provides a lot of spring when the American economy bursts into new growth. As new jobs are created, unemployment numbers decline, and discouraged workers are drawn back into the workforce.

The search market economy has a similar discouraged searcher elasticity that operates in a much smaller time frame. We often give up on searches for which we never find satisfying results. We may find partially satisfying results but in this case partially satisfying is the same as unsatisfying.

Discouraged searchers cannot find what they are looking for on any search service. Nonetheless, before they reach that point, many people try more than one service and that is why you need to integrate multiple search services into your optimization.

If you lose your Google search referrals for any reason, you don’t want to find yourself without any search traffic at all. Google should at most provide no more than 2/3 of your search referral base and I would say most sites probably have an opportunity to make Google less important.

After all, only 1 page gets to rank first for any given query. Some business site operators stop competing for Google rankings and they take their very relevant content to other services. Yahoo! and Microsoft have both benefitted from such Google rebellion through the years. If you can only rank 10th on Google, ranking 1st on Microsoft may provide you with more traffic.

Ranking 2nd or 3rd on Microsoft may provide you with more traffic than ranking 15th or 20th on Google. If you can optimize for the other search engines first, you should. As long as you take multiple search engine optimization seriously you’ll never be wholly dependent upon Google.

And that’s a good thing because, among other benefits, practicing multi-engine search helps ensure you create unique, distinctive content. Each search service will evaluate your content according to its own criteria. If you cannot chase the long tail on Google you should be able to chase it on Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Preparing for less than total domination of Google search results ensures you don’t leave the playing field with empty-handed. Once you have achieved significant visibility in the other search services you should give serious consideration to building search visibility in Google. But be absolutely sure you can survive two catastrophic events.

The first catastrophe is any change in Google’s indexing algorithm or data that causes you to lose search visibility. Your first line of defense against lost search visibility is to not lock yourself into algorithm-chasing techniques and tactics (such as relying extensively on links). Your second line of defense is to optimize for multiple search engines. Your third line of defense is pay-per-click advertising.

The second catastrophe is any change in Google’s market position. Although Google may continue to dominate search over all there can be times when more relevant search comes from other services. Why? Because that is what happens when the uncounted masses use search engines.

Google doesn’t have to lose significant market share for any specific vertical to be adversely affected. Searchers may intuitively stop using Google for vertical queries if the search results are inconsistent with past performance. Many people, for example, use search to navigate around large content sites.

The referral data for other search services may look small if you’re doing well in Google, but many people have reported satisfaction with their alternative search referrals when they lost or failed to achieve significant Google search visibility. Small numbers can seem large when the context changes.

It’s important to play to your search strengths, and that includes helping people choose to use search engines where they will find your content in favorabe positions. The search interfaces and search results speak for themselves. You don’t have to sell anyone an idea they don ‘t want to accept. All you have to do is point people toward the search you wan them to use.

Your specific market and demographics will determine what market share Google should capture in your field. Just understand that if you’re not optimizing for those other search services then you are not measuring your search market share properly. Google may not be as important to your search as you think.