Mythbuster: The Biggest Myth Online Is About Google

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 21 of November , 2007 at 10:49 am

Google PageRank is back in the news again. This time it’s from Titus Hoskins on SiteProNews. Unfortunately, he believes the same myth so many other people believe, and it’s all about Google. Thing is, as an Internet marketer, he should know better. Here’s the myth:

Free organic traffic from Google is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffic from Google over any other source of traffic on the web, except for traffic coming from my articles on other sites, and even that traffic probably originated from a search in Google.

You see? It’s all about Google. Not.

The myth that you need Google traffic to survive is perhaps the biggest myth about Internet marketing. It just isn’t true. You can build a website and never get traffic from Google and still survive. As long as you have a steady flow of targeted traffic from two out of three of the other top four search engines then you’ll do fine. Just look at the numbers:

From Hitwise, reflective of numbers in March 2007 …

• Google = 64.13%
• Yahoo = 21.26%
• MSN Live = 9.15%
• Ask = 3.48%

How many billions of searches do you think take place every day? This survey is take from a sample of 10 million searchers in March 2007. 21.26% of 10 million equals 2,126,000 - more than 2 million. This is just a small sampling of the number of people making searches every month and it’s just from one month. Multiply that number by 12 and you get 24 million searches in one year. Again, that’s just a fraction of actual searches taking place on Yahoo. If you appeared in .25% of those searches - a small fraction of the total searches at Yahoo in one year - you’d still appear in 60,000 SERPs. Let’s say only 10% of the people who view those SERPs clicked through to your website - 6,000 new visitors every year. Add that to the people who have you bookmarked and visit your website regularly. Convert 1% of those to sales at an average of $10 per customer and you’ve made $600 extra dollars. Again, that’s just a small fraction of Yahoo traffic.

Every year, traffic online increases. Most people new to the Internet have their home page defaults set at Yahoo, MSN, or AOL, and they don’t change them. That extra $600 you made from organic search at Yahoo, consider a PPC campaign and add another $2,000 to that. Then add a sponsored search drive and another $2,000 in revenue. Now you’re up to $4,600 new revenue this year just from one search engine. This is over and above what you are making with repeat business. Now add half that revenue from MSN Live and half it again from Ask.com. That’s a total of $8,050 new business, over and above the business your repeat customers bring you - in one year. Now increase that a measly 5% each year representing a growth of new business added to the amount of repeat business you get each year. Seeing the picture?

Are these figures realistic? I don’t know. I don’t know how you run your business. But I do know there are lots of people making money - more money than this - from search engines other than Google. All you need is a solid business plan and the ability to work it until it works. You don’t need Google, but it’s nice to have them on your side.

Category: SEO Myths, Search Engines

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