If you're expecting to see Canada's major financial institutions appear on the first page, you'll be disappointed.
TD Canada Trust is the only one of the majors that appears in the top 10. Aggressive cyberbank ING Direct is at the top of the search listings -- winner of that particular search-engine optimization contest. And HSBCdirect.ca occupies the top paid listing, giving it winning points for paid placement.
Winning the online search game is a growing competition, and one that is expected to result in more than $1 billion being spent on search-engine marketing (SEM) in Canada by 2010.
And it is a fast-moving competition. What tops the list one minute might be deposed by a contender the next.
It has spawned a whole new category of marketing, with British Columbia enjoying high status in the new and growing generation of SEM specialists.
Byrne, the national director of Yahoo Search Marketing Canada, was in Vancouver recently as part of a Yahoo team hosting and taking part in events focusing on this lucrative and growing segment. It's a field in which Canadian businesses are lagging behind their U.S. counterparts.
"Compared to all the other major developed economies [Yahoo is] in, Canada has been the slowest to adopt search marketing," said Byrne.
SEM promotes websites by pushing them up to the top of the search engine results, through a variety of means that can include search engine optimization (SEO) -- which is getting search engines to choose your site as the most relevant and freshest for any particular search request -- to paid placement.
There are a number of popular search engines, led of course by Google, which, according to Hitwise.com, accounted for 66.44 per cent of all U.S. searches for the four weeks ending Feb. 23. Google was followed by Yahoo! Search at 20.59 per cent, MSN Search at 6.95 per cent, and Ask.com at 4.16 per cent.
In 2007, $410 million was spent in Canada on search-engine marketing, and that number is expected to climb to more than $1 billion by 2010. U.S. companies spend a much higher proportion of their online budgets on search marketing. North American-wide advertisers spent $9.4 billion US in 2006, representing a 750-per-cent increase over 2002.
It's an important pipeline to potential buyers and customers. According to Yahoo research, 43 per cent of consumers rate the Internet as the best source for price comparisons, and 37 per cent turn to it most often in their consumer research. The Internet ties with word-of-mouth as being seen as the most reliable source of information for 24 per cent of users.
Among Canadians online:
- 78 per cent use search engines to research purchases;
- 27 per cent of those Web surfers end up making online purchases;
- 45 per cent of those searching online for product information end up buying offline;
- in 2007, Canadian consumers spent $10.5 billion in online purchases, and that number is projected to climb to nearly double for 2008.
The message for businesses, says Byrne, is that regardless of whether they cater to customers offline or on, search engines play an important role in promoting their products or services.
"We help them understand the role search engines play in their business, whether they are actively managing it or not," he said. "The reality is there are 85 million search queries a day in Canada, and we take people through the amount of influence search engines have on people's consumer decisions, on their buying decisions.
"What we are finding is that search engines have more influence in terms of offline consumer decision-making than they do in terms of online purchasing decisions."
Byrne said British Columbia's entrepreneurial spirit is pushing the province to the forefront of the sector, with businesses here developing expertise that has gained international attention.
source:http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=3fc37cab-4dae-4544-b18d-91128b1b5a88&p=2
