Yes, Google is still the dominant search engine around the world and if you’re an internet marketer or someone who wants to get a ton of traffic to their site, optimising for rankings in Google should be one of your priorities. Because a lot of people – and by “a lot”, we mean “most” – use it, you can be sure that if you rank high in search rankings for your particular field, you will get visited a lot by people surfing through Google’s search engine. Nonetheless, optimising for Bing and Yahoo! should not be neglected. In fact, there’s a good reason why you should be serious about it. Here’s why.

According to a recent report from analytics firm Experian Hitwise, Bing and Yahoo! actually have higher search success rates than Google. What does this mean? It means that more users click on search results when using Bing and Yahoo! than when they are using Google. For Google, this means that people are more likely to make a search again before they click on a search result.

The report from Experian Hitwise says that for the month of July in the U.S. market, Yahoo! tallied a search success rate of 81.36 percent, a modest decrease from its 81.63 percent record for the previous month. Meanwhile, Bing managed a search success rate of 80.04 percent for July from the 80.60 percent search success rate for the month of June. What’s important to note, as the data from the report reveals, is that Google had a lower search success rate. According to the report, Google had a search success rate of 67.56 percent for July, an increase from its 66.63 percent rate in June.

In plain terms, for the people who use Bing and Yahoo!, they are more likely to click on a result after just one search. This means that if you rank high on Bing and Yahoo!, it is more likely, compared to Google, that people will click on your link. On Google, people will likely make another search before making a decision to visit a site.

Sure, Google is still dominating in the search engine market share. The same report from Experian Hitwise says that Google had a 66.05 percent market share for July. This actually decreased from a 67.12 percent share for June. Searches through Yahoo! comprised 15.07 percent market share in July. For June, Yahoo! had a market share of 14.49 percent so the market share actually increased. Bing saw its market share decrease a little to 12.98 percent in July compared to June’s 13.19 percent. However, since Bing powers Yahoo! search in the U.S., market share increase of searches through Yahoo! is actually Bing’s gain. Together, Bing-powered searches accounted for 28.05 percent market share in July and 27.68 percent share in June.

That may not be half of what Google has in terms of market share but it is certainly no small market share. Imagine this, if 10,000 people per month search for your targeted keyword, 6,605 of those will likely use Google Search and 2,805 will use Bing-powered search (Yahoo! and Bing.com). The difference is that those who used Bing and Yahoo! are more likely to click through than those who use Google. For that reason alone, it’s important not to neglect Bing and Yahoo! even though Google still has the largest share of the pie in search engine market, and to date Google is still dominating the Bing Vs Google war.

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