Since 1998, Google has taken the web by storm.
Yahoo, MSN and Altavista’s popularity dwindled in front of the steep rise of Google and now most savvy web users do not even use those “outdated” search engines anymore.
Anyone using search engines other than Google is thought of as a newbie on the internet because “Google is so much better”. It is for this reason that you “Google” up stuff and not “Yahoo” or “Bing” it.
Google has advanced in the search engine game to such a large extent that it some users think of the internet when they think of Google.
Google might actually have a monopoly in the search market because of its sleek features and its huge market share.
But with its high demand comes a threat: Google’s dominate market share can get web users into trouble if they focus all their energy on Google alone.
If you are an online business owner, you have to understand that relying solely on Google is a horrible strategy. As with finance, the key to getting long-term, sustainable traffic is to diversify effectively.
Here are 3 reasons why you should not rely on Google alone:
1. Google owes you nothing: The central argument is simple to understand – A search engine owes the webmasters nothing. It does not owe you your rankings, neither do the search engines care about how much traffic you get. They could not care less if your website ranked on page 90.
It is your job to keep up with the latest SEO trends in order to make sure you rank high enough.
Unfortunately, most people cannot keep up with SEO because it is a full-time job. Search engine algorithms change all the time, which has caused many successful online businesses to go under.
Why? Because they were relying only on Google traffic.
These webmasters landed their website on the 1st page of Google for a competitive term, started making money and became short-sighted.
Not a good strategy.
Unless you have an old and established website, you can expect your Google rankings to fluctuate quite a bit, at least until you build a solid presence to warrant a certain ranking position.
2. There are other effective traffic sources: Even though Google is the most successful search engine, 30% of the search market is still dominated by other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.
Have you ever tried using these search engines to get additional traffic?
Always remember that you can use pay-per-click ads on Yahoo and Bing too, so Adwords should not be your only choice (unless you know what you are doing or if you have a lot of money to burn). If you do it the right way, you can spend much less on Yahoo and Bing and have a much larger ROI.
You would be surprised at how large the PPC  bidding differences are among these search engines. To give you an idea, one term that I bid on Google cost me $1.50 while the same term on Yahoo was 35 cents.
If you are not using the resources of other search engines, you are leaving money on the table. Period.
That being said, social media is another viable option, although it might take a lot more effort to gain traction in the beginning. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc can be effective for your market if you know how to use them correctly.
3. There is a lot more competition on Google: Because of the huge market share, nearly all prices on Google are inflated to (sometimes) absurd amounts. You can get a much better ROI using other search engines for your markets if you do your research properly.
It is nearly impossible to get the top positions for competitive terms in Google because of the significant investments involved. However, you might actually rank near the top in Yahoo and Bing with a smaller investment.
The main point is this: Because of Google’s success, everyone wants to be a part of Google. Advertisers are sometimes paying $10 to get a $5 customer on Google, which is inflating the PPC prices.
I personally think that if you can take the initiative, using other search engines can make you a lot of money because of the lesser competition and awareness.
In conclusion, search engines have a duty to go where the users go i.e. to display popular webpages. If you can get traffic from various sources, search engines will be force to give your pages more importance (because of the large amount of traffic they receive).