Question Box: Are keyword rankings the same across all search engines?

Question

Are keyword rankings the same across all search engines? In other words, if I find a low competition, high search volume for google, will it be the same for yahoo ect too or do i need to research keywords for each search engine and target different pages for each engine?

Answer

This is a tough question and I think it depends a little bit on the keywords. There are probably cases where they rank pretty much the same in the search engines and there are other times when they don’t.

One of my sites has a collection of famous quotes (http://www.myfamousquotes.com) and gets 15 times as many visitors from Yahoo as it does from Google.

I have a different site that is just the reverse; it gets 20 times as much traffic from Google as anywhere else.

So it kind of depends on the keywords.

But I think if you find a high-volume keyword in Google then it is probably going to be a high-volume keyword in Yahoo. And if that keyword has low competition in Google then it’s probably has low competition in Yahoo.

My strategy

Personally, when I am searching for high-traffic and low competition keywords, I usually just pick one search engine like Google to optimize for. I would recommend working on ranking high in one search engine and focus on that.

Once you’re ranking high in one search engine then you can look at your traffic stats and see if you’re getting traffic from other search engines.

It would be a waste to divide your time trying to rank high in two search engines and end up not ranking very well in either one.