Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced a strategic partnership deal with Mozila, the maker of the Firefox browser, to make Yahoo search the default search experience across its US PC and smartphone browsers. While Google has been the default global search experience since 2008, starting December things are going to take a new turn.
Yahoo has decided to localize it’s search experience, making Yahoo the default in the US, Yandex in Russia while Baidu remains the default in China.
Of course this means Yahoo will be increasing its share of the search market share starting December and given Marissa Mayer’s blog post, an improved version is expected to role out to everyone in 2015, it’s high time we considered what this means for SEO.
Will the focus and attention shift away from Google as a result of this announcement? No. Remember, Google’s Chrome browser is a huge competitor to Firefox. This means as far as browser based search experience is concerned, Google still has a strong hold. And Google is still by far the biggest search engine till the foreseeable future.
However, webmasters need to focus more on how to better optimize their websites for Yahoo.
Google has always dominated the US search market significantly. According to Comscore, Google has a 60% marketing share, it leaves Microsoft’s Bing with a 20% and Yahoo with 10%. This means much of the attention from SEOs have been on Google and a little more on Bing than Yahoo.
With this change taking effect by December, Yahoo’s market share is certain to increase. This in turn translates to SEOs paying extra attention to Yahoo than in the past.
Is your website ready for this change?
Many websites are not well optimized to enable Yahoo spiders crawl them as conveniently as Google. If you’ve always ignored optimizing your website for Yahoo search, now is the time you should start taking it into consideration.
Even though the market share Yahoo stands to gain from this deal may not be as significant has what Google or Bing has yet, but considering that Firefox search experience in the US is responsible for 100 billion yearly searches I think there’s a lot to be gained here.
What does this announcement mean for your SEO and content marketing plans? If you’re in need of a content marketing expert for your business, don’t forget to get in touch with us.
