Comscore recently released the February search engine ranking results. The news was good for Bing - as they gained .2 percent market share - from 11.3% to 11.5%. Google barely surged ahead by .1% to 65.5%. Yahoo continued to drop and is now at 16.8% of total search engine market share.

It really appears to me as if the search engine market share is starting to solidify and will probably hold at about these numbers for the next few months until a major development - hopefully something innovative - occurs. Google will likely control around 2/3 of the search engine marketshare for the forseeable future, while Microsoft and Yahoo will likely hover just below 30%.

How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

This news isn't the best for Denver small businesses looking to participate in online marketing. While Bing launched with quite a bit of fanfare, and the Microsoft Yahoo partnership in search offers a tiny bit of competition - Google is still in a dominant market position. While I fully realize that Google's pay-per-click system is based (mostly) on competition between advertisers, I can't help but think that more robust search competition would help to keep Google's pay-per-click prices down.

According to the December search engine market share report from ComScore, Bing once again made solid gains in marketshare in December 2009. Bing's total market share increased .4% from 10.3% to 10.7%. Google is still dominant, but barely eeked out a small .1% gain in marketshare, moving from 65.6% to 65.7%. Also note that the bleeding in search market share over at Yahoo is starting to slow. Yahoo's lost just .2% of total market share in December - compared to much larger losses in months prior.

How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

For Denver small businesses who engage in Internet Marketing, this is somewhat encouraging. Competition among search engines is very important. If a strong competitor eventually steps up to Google, it could mean lower costs for advertising on the various pay per click platforms. Competition can also spur on innovation at the search engines. While the trend for Bing is a good one, they still control a very small piece of search. Google is the undisputed king and will be for the foreseeable future.

If you're just breaking into marketing your Denver small business on the Internet, you need to focus on Google AdWords first. Since Google is the market share leader by a wide margin, start your ad campaigns with Google AdWords. It is the quickest way to learn what works and what doesn't. Once you have a successful campaign running on AdWords, you can port the campaign to the other search engine advertising platforms.

According to the latest data from ComScore, Microsoft's Bing search engine received the largest increase in total share in search for the month of November. Bing received approximately 9.9% of all search queries in October, this increased to 10.3% in November. Google saw a smaller share increase - 65.4% to 65.6%. Meanwhile, Yahoo continued its slide - falling to 17.5% from 18% in October. For the October numbers, please see my earlier blog post.

Mostly Good News for Bing

This obviously is mostly good news for Microsoft as more people were likely using the search engine for doing their holiday shopping. The downside is that this increase in numbers for using the Bing search engine comes at the expense of Yahoo. Given that visitors to the Yahoo.com properties will soon be using the Bing search engine, the preferred outcome for Microsoft would be for the increase in Bing market share to come at the expense of Google. That hasn't happened - at least not yet.

How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?

It is always good to have competition in the marketplace to keep costs down. In this case, as a Denver small business owner, competition among the major search engines will help to keep ad costs down. Google pretty much dominates the search market, and unless more competition for search ads emerges, the price to advertise on Google will continue to rise. Bing gaining in market share is good news - but it would be better news if search was more evenly divided among the search engines.

Denver Small Business advertisers should still focus their efforts on Google AdWords first to get the most data and results to base decisions on. If you're doing a significant volume with Google AdWords, then you'll probably also want to run essentially the same campaigns on Microsoft AdCenter as well.