Search engine competition to get aggressive

Gillian Shaw, Vancouver Sun

Martin Byrne has a simple Internet test for Canadian banks: The search engine guru suggests typing "savings accounts, Canada" into a search engine and see what comes up.

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.