Google might be the kingpin of the search engine world but over the last twelve months, searches powered by Microsoft Bing have increased at an impressive rate. In fact, just a few weeks ago Microsoft Bing over took Yahoo! to become the second most popular search engine of the world.

 
According to study published by comScore.com, more than 18.2 billion searches were conducted in the United States during December 2011.  Google catered to 12 billion of those searches, followed by Microsoft Bing with 2.7 billion and Yahoo! with 2.6 billion searches. The study found that during December 2011, Bing raised its market share by 0.1 per cent, while Yahoo! experienced a real drop of 0.6 per cent – 0.5 per cent of Yahoo’s lost market share went to Google.

It is interesting to note that in December of 2010 Bing only accounted for 12 per cent of the U.S. search market. Today the number stands at 15.1 per cent. A growth of 24.7 per cent may seem like a triumph, but when one compares Bing’s 15.1 per cent market share with Google’s 69.5 per cent, the leap doesn’t seem that enormous. Nonetheless Bing is on the right path; let’s see what the year 2012 has in store for this underdog of search engines.

Facebook completely dominated social networking in 2011 - a trend reflected in social networking in the United Arab Emirates.

According to StatCounter’s 2011 statistics, Facbook with 87.88 percent of the market share dominated social media in the United Arab Emirates in 2011. Youtube help the second spot with 4.11 per cent, followed by StumbleUpon and Twitter at 3.5 per cent and 3.3 percent respectively.

The poor showing for supposedly star performers like Twitter and Google+ (included in the Others category) is not surprising. Most users in the Middle East are still playing “catch-up” to micro blogs and Facebook killers. Nonetheless Twitter is gaining momentum, even if it’s at the expense of StumbleUpon, which lost 3.6 per cent of its market share in the last quarter of 2011. 

Apart from its success on social networking, Facebook is also usurping the traditional strongholds of search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing. People are spending more time on Facebook than on Google, or than on Yahoo and Bing combined. In fact 2011 became the first year when a social network thrash search engines in this particular category – a big bust for search engines.

The web is changing and uses across the world are changing with it. Let’s see how the old-web does against the now-web in 2012.

We all know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial element of web success. In 2011 alone, more than 300 million people used search engines every day, while globally search engine usage remained on a 10 per cent growth curve throughout the year – indomitable figures indeed. But how important is SEO to businesses in the Middle East? To gauge the affects of SEO on regional businesses, we decided to conduct a study of our own. 

The study was based on analysis of client feedback from more than twenty companies that use our SEO Dubai solutions. The survey covered clients from a variety of industries including real estate, insurance, banking, and government organizations, and was exclusively designed to identify the relevance of SEO to businesses operating in the region. 

Around 62 percent of the companies surveyed reported that SEO improved their website’s ROI by a margin of 30 per cent. Of these companies, 33 per cent confirmed that SEO improved their site’s lead generation by 51.1 per cent, while 47 per cent of the surveyed companies reported an increase in lead generation by 35 per cent. Although results vary between B2B and B2C markets, almost 80 per cent of our clients reported that SEO improved their site’s traffic by a whopping 79.8 per cent within the designated campaign period. 

“Our findings show that local companies have realized the marketing potential of Search Engine Optimization,” says Johnny Huntington, Managing Director Traffic. “Our results are in line with recent studies conducted in Europe, which suggest that search engine optimization remains the most valuable tool for increasing company brand visibility, and increasing a site’s traffic, leads and conversions.” 

Moreover the study proved that SEO is an extremely cost-effective means of marketing. The date revealed that in terms of dollar value our clients regarded SEO as a more efficient tool than Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. On average our clients allocated no more than 13.3 per cent of their annual marketing budget to SEO, and were extremely pleased with the “apparent” ROI. 

Algorithms aren’t going away anytime soon, and given the widening accessibility, affordability and understanding of SEO in the Middle East, the competition for SERPs will definitely become tougher in the future. This is precisely why 95 per cent of the companies we surveyed plan to keep SEO as part of their 2012 marketing budget. In fact, 52 per cent of the surveyed companies plan to “increase” their SEO budget in the coming year.  

To find out how SEO can help you generate leads, sales and conversions, and how it can help your site grow and prosper in the ultra-competitive environment of the Middle East, contact Traffic today.