We can all agree that Google owns the search market.
Have you heard anyone say.. “Dude, Yahoo the time for the movie“? or “Did you remember to MSN/live.com the directions?” (Why don’t we just say Microsoft search and be done with it?)
Nope.
But.. what if you decided to only target a website to Yahoo, using the things you know will keep you out of Google?
Will you still get qualified traffic?
The answer is.. yes. I’ve been doing just that since November.
What are you doing to target addtional qualified traffic from Yahoo and MSN/Live Search?
I have been running an experiment on a website focusing solely on Yahoo! and guess what? I have many top 10 results in Yahoo! and right now the site is getting 250 uniques a day…
After some people have commented I will come back and tell you how all the advice you are getting about NOT using the keywords meta tag is a really, really bad idea..
(Yes that has somehting to do with this experiment)
Happy Friday… let’s discuss in the comments :)
Ok Steve, you got me hooked. I want to hear more about the results of this experiment and your ROI.
so i guess the first question would be is how competitive are the terms? does this site generate sale / leads? if so what are conversions like and what is bounce rating at?
Ok Steve, tell us about using the Keywords Meta Tag … NOT
Loren…
that is all i used.. no other meta data..
streko…
avg bounce rate on 30 terms is 78%
30 terms.. in yahoo!
27 in top 10
12 in top 3
4 terms #1
ok how competitive?
does the site sell something?
what are conversions?
So you’re doing these sites with only meta keyword tags and no other meta data and Yahoo is treating them like gold?
@steve Yeah, sorry, I think that’s a WP plugin issue and thught I had it fixed. Sending to tech people now.
Please post what you were gonna do, just copy it beforehand in case you receive the same error again.
ok.. please delete the errors above..
Streko..
ok how competitive?
1 – 10 of 28,400,000
#1
1 – 10 of 18,500,000
#5
1 – 10 of 7,940,000
#3
1 – 10 of 51,400,000
#1
does the site sell something?
the company is a b2b company whose sales usually range in the $450k to $2.8 mil per sale with a sales cycle that is from 4 – 6 months.
what are conversions?
Conversions are a potential client filling out a form on the website, tracked from keyword to the “thank you” page.. with the IP address from the form submit being associated with a CRM back end and of course the referring visit.
wow.
so…..
whats the domain / keywords?
I have done regular optimization as i would with Google, titles, alts, image names, directory and url structure, etc.. but removed all meta data EXCEPT the keywords field.
Part 2 of the experiment is to now remove all the thingys i did to keep Google from indexing it.
to prove once and for all that the keywords field is NOT obsolete.
wow.x2
so…..x2
whats the domain / keywords?x2
domain – Created on 06-aug-2001
one owner..
keywords.. i cannot disclose because i sign mutual NDAs with clients.
so using the 4 results above…
1 – 10 of 51,400,000 – #1 in yahoo!
is
301 out of 20,000,000 in google.
1 – 10 of 7,940,000 – #3 in yahoo!
is
297 out of 2,790,000 in google.
1 – 10 of 18,500,000 – #5 in yahoo!
is
113 out of 294,000 in google
1 – 10 of 28,400,000 – #1 in yahoo!
is
87 out of 2,790,000 in google.
Are there any specific techniques that you would recommend for only Microsoft Search?
Loren:
MSN is next… i have 3 new clients who aren’t doing to well in MSN.. so i am running experiments on 4 non-profits i do “volunteering” for.. and then i will plug those into the new clients after i do the initial baseline metrics, keyword and competitor studies.
Hi Steve
Nice information but want to know how to make difference in optimization process for Yahoo and MSN with Google ? I think from one page we can not make target for Google and Yahoo at a time, we have to choose either one what do you think ?
It doesn’t matter from which search engine has gives me the most traffic. In my opinion, The more search engine you submit into, the more your site will get indexed and visited by many people
So what exactly are you suggesting for Live.com?
It’s the matter of traffic that brings revenue to the site, So better target Top search engine rather targeting only one
It is normal for people to want to rank in google but MSN traffic is much more likely to buy anything than visitors coming from google. The same goes with yahoo.
Google can highly increase unique visitors and clicks but a smaller percentage of those clicks will convert compared to live.com and yahoo.
I have noticed for sometime that Yahoo always returns the most relevant results for my searches. Google is iffy and MSN acts like it’s on drugs.
Excepts for Google maps, I avoid Google like the plague.
I head up an SEO department, and our clients overwhelmingly do better in Yahoo! over Google. We’re heavy on SEO content for our clients, so it’s probably closely linked to that, but I definitely have a lot of love for Yahoo.
I head up an SEO department, and our clients tend to do much better in Yahoo! over Google. We’re heavy on SEO content for our clients, so I do feel it is closely linked to that. I definitely have a lot of love for Yahoo!
Done that for several companies, globally, and rule of thumb would be never to leave out these easy things.
Apart from meeting all SE requirements it is a question of how much effort you can put into this to update. Many companies have huge systems running the sites, you cannot change the parameters so easily.
And which SE you target depends quite some on product / brand / target group.