Tag Archive for: Shareaholic

For the longest time, online marketing was all about making yourself visible on search engines, with a heavy emphasis on Google. But, social media, smartphones, and the wide array of apps with their own search capabilities are beginning to take a chunk out of search engine traffic and marketers are going to have to expand their focus if they want to continue to be successful.

A new report from Shareaholic shows that all of the top five search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and AOL – have all seen a significant decline in search traffic since December of 2013.

The report used data from December 2013 through May 2014 to evaluate aggregate organic search traffic numbers from more than 300,000 publishers reaching an audience of more than 400 million monthly unique visitors. From that data, Shareaholic saw that Google’s search traffic fell 17 percent between last December and May of this year.

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Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and AOL saw even larger drops in traffic compared to Google, with Bing and Yahoo both experiencing 31 percent declines.

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Shareaholic also looked at engagement from each search engine and found that although Google accounts for 17 times more traffic than Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and AOL combined, their users are often less engaged. This suggests that while Google may still control the vast majority of search traffic, it’s users may not be as valuable as the other more engaged searchers from across other search engines.

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