A bloggers view on search in Europe: Andreas Berg

What does „Search in Europe“ mean?

Firstly when thinking on „Search in Europe“ one has to be aware of the main group searching in Europe and thus making up the potential search volume. In the European Union around 500 million people are living coming from 27 different nations speaking 23 different languages. One has to admit that these values do not represent the true search volume but nevertheless they give an idea of the potential one. Additionally these countries use different characters (e.g. the Greek language) and show a different search behaviour as can be seen from the example of Everts article concerning the topic “car insurance”. The use of different languages within one and the same country (like for example the use of French, German and Italian in Switzerland) further complicates the matter.

After this rudimental analysis of the market conditions I want to focus one the page which holds the lion`s share of the search market in Europe: Google. Here I want to note despite Google defending its monopoly of more than 90 % market share in Western and Central Europe the situation in the Eastern European countries looks still different (e.g. look at Ukraine and Czech Republic, the Global Search Report is a good tip to get an overview though being not up-to-date). A further hint on upcoming difficulties for the search platform Google to corner the Eastern European market was the integration of the search engine „Yandex“ instead of Google by Firefox (more information is available here).

Conclusion:
Search in Europe is nothing for sissies and an extremely multifaceted and challenging environment. Here knowledge on market conditions and the use of innovative tools are a prerequisite for success. According to my opinion excellent results in European campaigns can be reached best with the support of native speakers. They provide the imperative insight into the specific market conditions and hence facilitate the set up of a highly profitable campaign in the field of SEM.