Sometimes ideas for blogs come to me in a dream, riding a unicorn wearing a jaunty hat, and I immediately awake and find that my subconscious has written the whole thing down for me. Yes, SEO haunts my dreams. What of it?
More often, however, these short missives spring from conversations or research that I’ve done for clients. As one of my old bosses in California said to me, ‘Damian, make your work work for you’. That company went under, but it was fun while it lasted.
Anyway, this week, I did some research for one of our partners on search engine usage in the Middle East and in Hong Kong. There’s really not a whole lot of information out there that’s readily accessible, so I figured I’d expand what I’d done into more of a global overview and share it with you, the dear website hits readers of the Vertical Leap Blog.
The numbers in the table are the use percentages for each search engine; I’d take the exact numbers with a pinch of salt, but it does demonstrate share. I’ve put the few in which Google is less than 90% in green. You’ll see, too, that I’ve helpfully put a note as to what the significant other is in China, Russia and Ukraine.
Sometimes, you do some research and you think you might find out something interesting, or surprising, or mildly confounding of expectation. Sometimes, however, you find that what you thought was true actually is true, and all you can do is shrug a bit. I don’t think it takes too much analysis of this to suggest that mostly, we all live in a Google shaped heteronomy. Which is nice, obviously, as it makes our jobs optimising websites to the peculiarities of search engines much easier.
What this chart doesn’t show, however, is the use of Google.com vs Google.local (.co.uk, .com.hk, etc). Now, the localised versions of Google all use essentially the same algorithm tweaked to the country of interest, and they default to the local version for the country from which you are searching. It’s a safe assumption to make, then, that ‘Google’ means ‘Google.local’, and likewise for yahoo, and so forth. Circling back round to what started this all off, imagine you were trying to attract visitors in Hong Kong, but your site is an English language site; hk.yahoo.com and google.com.hk both have similar usage figures; which one will be the more useful for your site? Well, Google.com.hk allows users to select an English search, whereas hk.yahoo.com has a redirect back to uk.yahoo.com*.
Can we reach an interesting conclusion from this data we have before us, then? I guess the lesson I’d draw is that to do a little research on the local search employed in countries your targeting, and to report from their local versions of Google, if, as is likely, that’s the predominant engine of choice. This gives you a much more accurate insight into how your website is ranking in search engine returns.
Larger overview (and you’ll have heard me say this before) – all markets are local, and it pays to get to know yours better.
*I realise that this is likely because my IP is a UK one. It’d be interesting to see if anyone in the US has a different experience?
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