To start with, for the past several years, we’ve seen Google achieving an effective market share more in the 70-75% range.  How do we come to this?  By looking at a large variety of client stats over the years we can plainly see that Google is consistently driving 70-75% of the organic (non-paid) traffic across a wide variety of different market types.  We hypothesize that this difference is due to a higher percentage of clicks per search on Google vs Yahoo and Bing.

It has been long known that not all searches result in clicks.  The best data we’ve seen is pretty old and was a release of data from AOL searches.  This data of over a million searches showed that users only clicked on a link ~50% of the time.  We strongly suspect the CTR (Click Through Rate) at Google (and Yahoo and Bing for that matter) is higher than 50% but, we also believe that the comScore numbers are misleading, because they only report searches, not CTR.  Thus, while Google may be losing some gross market share, their effective market share, that is the market we all care about – actually driving users to our sites, is still dominated by Google.

Google still drives the vast majority of traffic and we don’t think that this is likely to change soon.

To quickly balance this discussion, while Google is the traffic king, we do find that traffic from Yahoo and Bing typically converts at a higher rate – but that’s a topic for another time.

So why is this a good idea?

To add to Matt’s point that this will help the search engines find your pages more readily, from a strategic point of view, the idea behind this would be to promote what is known in the industry as ‘local search’.  Local search refers to terms that include local identifiers. Local search is an increasingly important segment of the search market.  To take Matt’s example further, these local store pages would be more likely to appear in the search results for a term like “San Jose frozen yogurt”.

My main point here is that a local search strategy is an important consideration in contemporary search marketing strategies.  Matt’s tactic fits in perfectly with a local search strategy.  Not only will this generate more search traffic to your site, but this traffic will be more likely to drive business growth / convert traffic to customers.

Happy Hunting!