Don’t forget about Yahoo and MSN Search: Don’t just optimize for Google…

I know that the hot thing to do with your blog right now is to optimize it for Google, however, don’t forget about Yahoo and MSN Search.

I have been looking through logs over the passed weekend and I have noticed that although I don’t see nearly as much traffic coming from Yahoo and MSN as I do from Google, the CTR (click thru rate) of visitors coming from these two search engines is over twice that of those coming from Google.

There are a lot of ways to look at this. The first thing to come to mind is that searchers from MSN and Yahoo are not as savvy as Google searchers and may not be as blind to ads as those coming from Google. I cannot really measure this, but, there is probably some truth to it. What I can measure, however, are the keywords that searchers from various search engines use to find my blogs and the number of times they click ads per those searches. This is where the difference between CTR of visitors from Yahoo and MSN as compared to CTR from Google visitors becomes very interesting.

What I actually found was that CTR for the same keywords was just a bit higher on Yahoo and MSN than on Google. I get about 20% higher CTR and I attribute this to the internet savvy of the searchers as I mentioned earlier. This 20% doesn’t account for the over 200% greater overall click thru rate so where is the rest coming from?

Well, I rank very high for certain keywords on Yahoo and or MSN that I don’t rank well for if at all in some cases on Google. Let me give you an example. I write a blog about BlackBerry devices. If you search for the keyword BlackBerry on MSN my blog, RIMarkable, shows up in the results on the first page. Believe it or not, I don’t rank at all for the keyword BlackBerry on Google. (I will have to do something about that, but, that is for another post.) CTR for that keyword and other such keywords on other blogs is very high. In fact, so high, that it raises the total CTR for the entire search engine to level twice that or better on Google.

So what does all this mean? To make a long story short, if you are putting all your eggs into the Google basket, you could be missing significant amounts of revenue from the other search engines. You may also find that it is much easier to rank highly for certain keywords on search engines other than Google.

Google, Yahoo Search, MSN Search, Click Thru Rate, SEO