Experian Hitwise has released up to date data suggesting that Google’s search dominance in the UK is far, far greater than its dominance in the USA.

The report suggests that, contrary to what you might read around the web, Google’s share is growing (having increased from 90.53% in May to 92.02% in June 2011).

Google UK Market Share 2011

Yahoo and Bing combined accounted for 5.84% of all searches, the research concludes.

Google in the US

It’s a completely different story in the USA, however, where Google’s market share is a much more modest 65.4% (still not to be sniffed at)!

The US market has been more favourable towards Bing and Yahoo, with the two search engines combined hitting 14% of the Stateside market share.

How this Affects SEO

At Tecmark, we (in most campaigns) use Google for our rankings checks. But we use Bing Webmaster tools and we report on traffic from all search engines.

Although the UK market share is small for Yahoo and Bing, we believe it will grow (as we have seen in the US) and while Google is definitely the focus for the moment in terms of UK SEO campaigns, we don’t expect that this will always be the case.

As such, we:

  • Use techniques that have a positive rankings impact across all three of the biggest search engines
  • Monitor traffic levels from the three major search engines closely
  • Use tools provided by all search engines, e.g. both Google and Bing webmaster tools.

Yes, Bing and Yahoo have a long way to go to even come close to consuming a notable segment of the market. And with search overall account for almost 35% of web traffic, however small 5% seems, it can’t be ignored.