Highlights of the survey:

• Google Places (Google Maps) drives 33% of all website visits to local business websites
• Organic search drives 25% of all website visits to local business websites
• Yahoo & Bing account for less than 7% of all website visits to local business websites
• 59% of consumers use Google every month to locate a good local business
• 71% of search users value local search results & actively use these results
• 60% of consumers give more consideration to local results that have images

Read “Survey: Where do local business websites get their traffic & do consumers appreciate local search results?”

For more into

Optimizing for Local Search Even More Important With Google’s New Blended Local Search Results

The post Where do local business websites get their traffic? appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Yahoo and MSN are currently testing the merger of the search engines. Testing will continue over the summer. If all goes well here’s the schedule –

August/September – Complete merger of Algorithm search (organic search).

September/October – Complete merger of Paid Search (Yahoo Search Marketing & Microsoft/Bing AdCenter) platform.  (We will be working to ensure a smooth merger of the Yahoo and Bing paid listing platforms for our clients running either or both Yahoo or MSN PPC accounts).

Note – They plan to have the mergers complete prior to the holiday season, but if there problems that would delay this they say they will defer the schedule (Thank you!)

According to ComScore the market share of both Yahoo and MSN both increased a bit recently at the expense of Google, so once this merger is complete the combined search properties should have about a 30% search market share.

For More Info

Our article after the Search Alliance Announcement on what we can expect from this merger

The post Yahoo & MSN search alliance update appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.

Microsoft and Yahoo took a tumble in their year-over-year search share in October 2008, according to Nielsen Online. All searches were down 2%, which is quite surprising considering the election and the economy. Yahoo was down 12% and Microsoft was down 19%. Ask.com took a hit as well with a decrease of 22.9%

Google continues to dominate the search engine industry at a 61.2% market share.

Read the full article and the complete chart of search engine rankings

The post Microsoft, Yahoo Take Major Hits in Search Share Rankings as reported by Nielsen Online appeared first on eVision Online Marketing.