Search Engines for International Marketing

In North America, we live in a very Google-centric world. While Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) is doing a good job of gaining market share, Google still has 65% of the search market.

But if you’re selling and marketing your products and services internationally, it’s important to know that Google isn’t the only game in town. Any investment you make in search engine optimization (SEO) should be tailored to the markets you’re targeting.

Did you know that Google isn’t the main search engine in a number of important markets?

• China – Baidu owns 80% of the market – Google is markedly on the decline since the public spat between the company and the Chinese government regarding censorship.
• Russia – Yandex is the leader, with almost 70% of the market and Google at 22%
• South Korea – Naver has 73% of the market , followed by Daum at 11.5%. Google is almost non-existent.
• Japan – Yahoo! owns 45% share (Yahoo! is now powered by Bing)
• Czech Republic – Seznam.cz has 63% share.

Make sure that the SEO company you’re working with has some experience dealing with these other search engines and that they’re optimizing your site to perform well on them. Most SEO companies focus on Google - understandably for North American companies - but if they’re optimizing for Google and you’re trying to grow in Russia, you’re missing 75% of that market.