Don’t Forget Yahoo & Live
One thing I have noticed about most people online is that all their attention is focused on getting traffic from Google. One thing it is easy to forget with the amount of attention the Google search engine gets is that Yahoo and Window’s search engines still get millions of visits daily. That is a lot of untapped traffic left lying around that nobody is really optimizing for.
I became increasingly aware of this phenomena when I noticed that Live and Yahoo were actually giving me traffic that ended up converting into sales. For those of you who think this is pure dumb luck or coincidence, it has been two months since I noticed this now and traffic still continues to flow from those two sources.
If you are naive enough to think that optimize for Google makes your page optimized for Yahoo or Window Live then think again. I typed into Google one of the keywords I rank well for and my site was at number four at the time (it has since gone to number one). Then I typed in the same keyword string into Yahoo and different one of my sites showed up in the second position for the search string. So I had one keyword and two completely different websites of mine had showed up in the SERP. In case you were wondering, no those two sites were not linking to each other.
On further analysis, Yahoo and Live can produce better results than Google on certain competitive keywords and keywords than are likely to contain spam. Although these two engines do not compete with Google on relevancy as yet, the key advantage that they have is no one is optimizing for them. In fact I just took a look at this blog’s traffic and much more of it comes from Live.com than from Google.com. The simple fact is that everyone is gaming the Google system and trying to rank number one, where as nobody is competing on the other two.
Here is the real reason you want to take a look at your Live.com and Yahoo results.
Traffic Re-Routing
Never heard of it? It is probably one of the most useful traffic methods used by big internet companies especially the likes of Google, Live and Yahoo. Why do you think they install they promote their Toolbars for you to put onto your browser. It’s all part of their method of gaining the ability to re-route traffic to their engine. What often happens when you type a keyword into the navigation bar at the top of your browser without a .com at the end of it, or something even if you do and the domain doesn’t exist you get redirected to a search engine. Basically it’s a game of first to re-route the traffic gets the traffic, it’s a game of milliseconds.
Microsoft does an excellent job of re-routing traffic through it’s network, take for example when it launched Live.com (a great domain purchase). Live.com was previously a poorly used site run by another company (according to my observation of archive.org historical data). On the day Microsoft launched Live.com in the middle of last year it went to the 15th most traffic site on the internet according to Alexa.com. The launch wasn’t really promoted, Microsoft just started redirecting all their traffic there. Microsoft does a great job redirecting traffic through out it’s network of sites. The perfect example of this is if you are a user of their service Hotmail, once you log out, you are redirected to msn.com or minemsn.com.au in Australia which is a massive media network and source of advertising revenue. If it wasn’t for that redirect the MSN network would get considerably less traffic and wouldn’t be able to charge the premium they do for advertising.
Why is Direct Navigation Important?
A while back I remember reading that one SEO consultant in Brisbane was advising his clients to purchase catchy and memorable names rather than generic names. I can only hope he is a domain investor and was trying to bamboozle his competitive and take the good names for himself because that is utterly erroneous. I mean say “Dave” comes to me and owns a successful chain of Pet stores than sell dangerous Australian animals. Would you advise him to get a domain like dangerousdavespetemporium.com or something like petshop.com.au. Well for a start the first one is way too long, secondly nobody is going to ever type that into their browser and the whole business is going to be reliant on search engine traffic. On the other hand petshop.com.au might get 20 or so type ins a week which means traffic will come without having to constantly add to and optimize your pages. The other added value is that owning a generic name like petshop.com.au gives your business a higher profile.
It is estimated that somewhere between 30-35% of traffic goes through search engines, which means there is a lot of people going to sites via type in. I have heard elsewhere on the low that 15-20% of the search engines traffic comes from rerouting type ins that do not resolve to the .com or are mistyped (without someone registering the type of course).
So just remember if Google has got you down there is plenty of traffic around elsewhere.
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Very well spotted, people often forget the elusive obvious.