[Emily0415]

Do I need Google? Is Google that important for my business to be successful online? I only read articles about how online businesses depend so much on Google for their own sake. I wonder if there’s a way to avoid this search Engine and still be successful.

[Paul Norman]

Over 80% of UK searches are made on Google. They are the market leaders by a huge margin. Their nearest rival, Yahoo, account for about 5%.

Obviously, you should not ignore the others, but you cannot pretend Google are not there! And - they are not evil, just successful!

[Alvin]

Does a fish need water,as Paul says.

You can of course be successfull without google.I think it depends on your product and your market area.

But why would you want to avoid google.?

Google makes or breaks most online business's

Alvin

[Dotwhack]

You never want to put all your eggs in one basket so you don't want to just rely on the search engines to get traffic to your website - however as most people find websites by searching for them instead of going directly, they do need to be in your marketing mix.

[Indizine]

Dont mention eggs near Alvin

[openmind]

I smell spam

[Alvin]

Would that be spam and eggs.

Alvin

[DavidT]

Canadian Spam - maybe?

Around 60% of our traffic comes from search engines - say 80% of that from Google (can't remember split but what Paul said sounds about right).

So if we completely ignored Google - 48% of site visits gone... but even if we ignored Google, may still see some of that.

As for surviving without Google - just depends what else you do to market, and what you need to survive.

[openmind]

Originally Posted by Alvin

Would that be spam and eggs.

Alvin

Nah just spam and a helpful member with one post popping up with the "ideal solution" in response to the OP

I could be wrong of course, it has actually happened before. Me being wrong that is...

[AccountingBasics]

Google is the main source of all our traffic.

At the moment we are getting about 20% of all our traffic from referring sites. So do not rule out getting links and posting to blogs. Our traffic is fairly low at the moment as it is a new site.