Google Closing In

What Percent of Your Traffic is From Google?

Last month, Hitwise reported that Google comprised 72.4 percent of all U.S. searches carried out in the four weeks concluding April 25, 2009. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com picked up 16.3 percent, 5.78 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. For Google that represents a 7% year over year change.
The other 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for only 1.4 percent of U.S. searches.

In April 2008, 14% of the traffic to our website - ProceedInnovative.com - was from Google organic searches.
In April 2009 it was 34%! In that same month only 4% was from Yahoo.

What else did Hitwise say about April ’09 compared to April ‘08?
- Lengthier search terms, averaging five to more than eight words long, have risen 7 percent.
- Business and Finance, Sports and Online Video categories displayed double-digit escalations in their share of traffic arriving directly from search engines.

What does this mean for my website marketing?
Three things:
- It’s all about Google.
- Go for the long tail.
- If you can get your site to come up in Google for long tail search terms, it could become a goldmine.

How about you? What percent of your traffic is from Google?

Do you optimize for the short tail or the long tail? Send us your comments.