One of the things that we do as professional legal bloggers is pay attention to which search engines are dominating the market. The answer is obvious (it’s Google) but the extent of their dominance and how it is trending can impact your law firm’s online marketing strategy. For example, if a new competitor enters the search engine market, it might be wise to get in on the ground floor and concentrate your energy on ranking well, there. Or if the competition for high rankings on Bing are 10% what they are on Google, but Bing has 20% of the traffic in your area, you may want to take advantage of that bargain.
We do this kind of survey somewhat often. We checked in back in November, 2015, in February, 2017, and in September, 2017. Some recent developments warrant checking back in, again.
Here’s the Pie Chart
According to the global statistics at Net Market Share, the search engine field looks like this:
Trends to Watch: Bing and Yahoo! Flounder
The big takeaway is that Bing and Yahoo! search engines are losing even more ground to Google. Last September, Bing had 4.92% of the global market and Yahoo! had 3.60% of it. Now, those percentages have shrunk to 4.62% and 2.66%, respectively—a collective loss of 1.24% of the total market, and 14.6% of their influence.
Trends Not to Watch: Baidu’s Rising
The losses of Bing and Yahoo! amount to barely more than a percentage point. This makes Baidu’s rise from 7.65% up to 11.79% since we last checked in back in September seem like the big story, here.
It isn’t.
Baidu is the major search engine in China, so their growth in the global search engine market reflects things like China’s technological development, the proliferation of the internet in Asia, and Chinese users looking for an alternative to Google.
Unless you’re running an international law firm that relies on clientele in Asia, Baidu’s rise should not influence how you market your firm, online.