Yahoo is losing ground to Google in the fight for PPC market share, reported the news media this week. There are two important reasons that can explain this lag in relative PPC growth. First, Yahoo's PPC-publisher program, YPN, is limited to the US. That means that all of the webmasters living abroad who want to publish YPN can't, unless they do so through an American's account. In effect, this means Yahoo isn't competing with Google for publisher-based PPC revenue.
Second, Google has increased its market share of overall searches and the attached PPC by major partnerships and acquisitions. For example, Google inked a deal earlier this year to power social-networking giant Myspace's searches. It already was backing AOL's searches, which account for a little under 10% of world search volume.
Furthermore, Google has bought out the Mozilla Firefox browser. Now, when you download and install Firefox (which Google pays webmasters to refer people to!), the Google search toolbar automatically installs with it! The result is that people who want information as they're browsing are more likely to search via Google. The toolbar can also be downloaded for Internet Explorer, further growing Google's market share of search and PPC. As an aside, I wonder when Explorer will come with an MSN search toolbar auto-installed?
The corollary is that SEO for Google is going to take on an increasingly important role, as Google's market share of search increases. Furthermore, this will give Google an even more dominant voice in webmaster circles as to how sites should be designed. On the flip side, with a greater market share of searches and PPC, advertising costs in the PPC/CPC/SEM world are going to increase. Ironically, this might push smaller SEOs who are testing conversion rates of different keywords to do their testing via Yahoo's PPC program. ~ I haven't been blogging for a while as I've recently begun university, and law school is very demanding time-wise. Take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter.
SEO Montreal is a Montreal-based local Search Engine Optimization consulting company. Nous sommes une agence spécialisée dans le référencement. It is part of the SEO ROI family.
