Following our post last year on Google UK’s market share in 2007, here are some figures providing an indication of Google’s Market share in the UK in 2008. Hitwise are providing the numbers again, and in a relatively short sampling period during March 2008, they found Google to be holding a market share 87.5%, 10 percentage points greater than the same figures for 2007. They found 73.7% to be using google.co.uk, and 13.8% google.com. Clearly Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask among others have therefore lost ground to their primary competitor.
Particularly interesting in the same report was the statistics regarding the proportion of users opting to use Google’s ‘Pages from the UK’ search option. The report confirms intuition by showing only 13.6% of searchers to make use of this facility. This will help you decide the relative value of a .co.uk TLD vs. a .com or alternative (a google.co.uk search for ‘Pages from the UK’ will only return pages with a .co.uk TLD).
For more details, click through hitwise.
These statistics source from a compilation of SERPS behaviour studies for which I’ve listed source information at the end of the article. If you disagree with a figure, or have additional figures or sources, please do post them to the discussion.
- 42% of search users click the top-ranking link. 8% click the second-ranking link, and the click-through rate (CTR) continues to drop thereof.
- When these two top-ranking links are artificially switched, the click-through ratio of 42-8% drops to 34-12%, demonstrating the importance of engaging copy in addition to rank position.
- 62% of search users click a link on the first page of search results
- 23% of searches progress to the second page. Presumably the difference between 62% ans 23% stems from searchers trying either another keyword or another engine, or giving up.
- 80% f unsuccessful searches are followed with keyword refinement.
- 41% of searches unsuccessful after the first page choose to refine thir keyword search phrase or their chosen search engine.
- 77% of search users choose organic over paid listing when searching, 67% choose organic search when purchasing.
- When the searcher is purchasing, organic click-through generates 25% higher conversion rates than equivalent Pay-Per-Click (PP) click-through.
- 40% of SEO campaigns aware of their ROI achieve returns in excess of 500%, while only 22% of PPC campaigns were able to achieve this value.
- Daily use of search engines rose from 33% in 2002 to 59% in 2005. The average day in 2005 reported 60 million people using a search engine. As of March 2007, Google accounts for 64% of US searches and 77% of UK searches
The validity of these statistics depend on various experimental factors (i.e. large, representative samples of searchers/searches), and on accurate statistical analysis.
For more in depth analysis, the sources for this article were:
Please post addition figures or sources, or your view, in the comments.
The latest figures on Google’s market share compared to its primary search competitors Yahoo, MSN, and Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) have been published by Hitwise. As always, the numbers are astounding, revealing that Google holds a 77% market share, meaning overthree quarters of UK internet searches are made through Google. Yahoo is now holding 8%, and while MSN and Ask are both at 5% and falling.
Comparing the UK to the US figures, for which Google has just broken 66.6% or two thirds market share, it’s clear that UK internet searchers even more than US searchers turn first to Google.
A collective 23% is not to be sniffed at, but clearly firms services the UK market and requiring SEO services should look first to SEO specialists with strong results in google.co.uk.
Technorati Tags: seo, uk, search engine market, google, yahoo, msn
This is a great image from an eye-tracking experiment that clearly demonstrates the importance of organic SEO. Check it out.
From the same conference, Andy Budd summarises and presents links to several other presentations from industry spokespeople.
