Targeting individual search engines; a technique from the past?

Posted on 14th February 2008 at 3:22 pm by Manley

There was a time when SEOs were recommending different landing pages for different engines.

Thankfully this has gone the way of meta keyword stuffing, but is there an argument for still focusing campaigns on individual engines or should companies be adopting a more holistic search offering?

Happy Valentine's day!

In the course of this post I am going to seem to switch between both sides of the same argument several times. Please bear with me.

In the UK Google dominance is much higher than across the pond. For this reason there is much more of an argument for companies, particularly those with wider verticals, to place all their emphasis on Google. Because of this many companies adopt a 'we only care about Google' stance. To be fair, it is hard to argue with that.

With Yahoo! and Live there is often less competition, they have less sophisticated algorithms and they are more predictable than Google, so the cost of a position in these engines can be considerably less than a Google position.

The problem here is ROI - whilst it is relatively easier to rank well in the non-Google engines, the corresponding traffic can be so minimal (depending on location and market) that the cost per conversion is many times higher than it is with Google.

That cost, when applied only to direct traffic from the appropriate engine is normally prohibitive, but there are different personas using each engine. I am not simply talking about whether a Yahoo! user is more likely to buy your product or service than a Google user either.

Invoking Manley's search referrer stereotyping rule of thumb, Yahoo! users tend to be more socially orientated than Google users and are thus more likely to provide you with links than their Google counterparts, so ranking well in Yahoo! is likely to help your position in Google's SERPs as well. Who knows, good position in Ask could even get you a .edu link!

At the end of the day though, the majority of best practice and link-building strategies which an ethical professional would use for Google are going to work for the other engines as well. Deliberately excluding Slurp aside, there is very little to optimising for Yahoo! which would differ from optimising for Google.

If your site is performing badly in any engine, it is a sign that there is a problem with the site development. It might be that this is a known issue or that it is a site architecture problem, and you may decide that the ROI is not enough to justify the work, but monitoring and reporting across the engines is important. Optimising for Google should still cover all of those bases.

So, in summary, for a generic business model:

1. Monitor performance across Google, Live, Yahoo! and possibly Ask.
2. Play close attention to any vertical engines in your sector.
3. Optimise your pages for search, rather than for a specific engine.

Now I need to go and make my wife a card.

Manley's search referrer stereotyping rule of thumb:

• Google => Professional, technically savvy users
• Yahoo! => Web 2.0, social users
• MSN/Live => Lower tech loyal users
• Ask => Academic

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File under: google yahoo! ask live

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