The number of people searching on the internet is still growing, making SEO within all companies marketing mix an essential not a tag-on. There were 1,160 m searches in the UK in February 2006 compared to 893 m searches in February 2005 which represents 30% year-on-year growth in terms of the number of searches. [comScore]
Google dominates the UK search market, powering 77% of UK internet searches.[Hitwise, June, 2006]
MSN and Yahoo! each powers just over 7% of UK internet searches.
Ask.com has 5% market share.
Google UK is the most visited site in the UK, receiving twice the share of visits as MSN Hotmail, the number 2 site.
Visitors to Google UK spent an average of 13 minutes and 30 seconds on the site in the week ending 20th May 2006 – the longest session duration for a search engine.
The highest volume searches on Google UK were ‘ebay’, ‘hotmail’, ‘bebo’, ‘yahoo’ and ‘argos’.
84.5% of visits to Google properties go to the UK or .com search engine.
Google images is the most popular sub-domain after the main Google search engine.
Yahoo!’s portal and email service are its strongest properties, with 30% of visits to Yahoo!’s top 20 properties going to the UK or .com portal and 31% going to the UK or .com mail site. By comparison, less than half that volume (15%) went to Yahoo! Search properties.
MSN’s Hotmail, accounted for nearly half (44%) of visits to MSN’s top 20 properties. [Hitwise, June, 2006]
There was a 23% increase in search engine usage from 2004 to 2005 (60.7 million users in September 2005 up from 49.3 million in September 2004). [ComScore Media Metrix, 2005]
