Hmm if I had one wish from the SEO Genie, what would that be? Well I’d be severely tempted to ask for Jim Boykins secret SEO tools, accurate backlink counts or less FUD. In the end though I think I’d just ask for more competition in the search engines.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think Google have done some amazing things to advance the web, they have a lot of clever guys working for them. Doing PPC in Russia for these last 4 years has made me look on the sophistication of Adwords and WMC with a renewed sense of appreciation. The problem is they have been too successful. In many markets they have a dominating market share, in the UK for example they enjoy an 82% market lead according to the latest statistics from Hitwise.
While that position means they can freely push innovation and market direction, it also means they don’t have any checks and balances on what they do. Without the fear of competition they don’t have to worry about their customers too much. Equally the webmasters are locked into depending on one engine for their search traffic. That isn’t too healthy for web.
Depending on one search engine makes businesses more susceptible to changes there. Paid links or bad neighbourhoods – you name the latest threat. A few tweaks from Google can break a business and that is a sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of every webmaster.
The thing I really enjoy about the Russian market is that we still have three strong search engines. It makes online marketing more exciting and I really believe it gives webmasters more stability.
So my wish to the SEO genie would be to slip some market share to Yahoo!, MSN and Ask. Let’s get some competition back in the game.
To keep this going, I’m calling out the following people:
Jim Boykin at http://www.jimboykin.com
Chris Garrett at http://www.chrisg.com
John Andrews at http://www.johnon.com
Fantomaster at http://fantomaster.com/fantomNews
Digital Ghost http://speakingfreely.wordpress.com
* P.S. Sorry Matt, I couldn’t resist the call of photoshop. Heh ;)
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Nick Wilsdon
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Nick, I really want to push the idea of spreading market share. We need to have a few conversations first. Organize it better than pushing a meme. Ask already gets 50% of my searches and I’d like to see a big push from SEOs marketing Ask. But we need help and some marketing. Since we’re all marketers… ;)
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Hi Dean – will send you a msg offline. It’s an interesting idea.