WHY MICROSOFT NEEDS YAHOO: A SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING TAKE
Online advertising matters a lot in search engine marketing. Many search engine marketing practitioners add online advertising into their campaigns because online advertising is one great way of achieving visibility on the Internet and driving targeted traffic to a website. Traffic is valuable in the search engine marketing business, because that is where the money comes from.
But it is a two-way deal nonetheless. Companies with on-going search engine marketing campaigns hope to drive in a good business with online advertising. The websites that make online advertising possible, especially through the use of targeted search keywords, also make a lot of money in the deal. This is why Google sits unchallenged on its throne, and this is why Microsoft is scrambling to acquire the Yahoo! portfolio.
Nearly everyone who uses the Internet knows that Google is a giant. It is the undisputed king of search engines, enjoying a share of some 66% of searches done in the United States alone. Google is the reason why search engine marketing as a field exists in its current form today. What makes the world of search engine marketing turn is the system that Google uses to integrate online advertising with their current services.
With the way things currently are with Microsoft, the company cannot even compete closely with Google. It may be the largest software company in the world right now, but in the arena of search engine marketing and online advertising, it is far outclassed by Google. What Microsoft needs to even come close to Google, if it can, is to be able to reach a wider base with its search system and other services. And it needs to have the charm to keep its base loyal to itself.
That is the biggest reason why Microsoft is out to get Yahoo! and its online real estate properties. Yahoo! is the most visited network of websites on the Internet today, but it is largely in trouble. The problem with Yahoo! is that it entered into ventures that did not pay off as it had expected in the last few years and it is posting losses in the recent years. It is even speculated that the company, a dotcom pioneer in the early 1990s and one of the last of them still alive, may not be able to keep itself together for much longer. But despite its flailing status, it is still a force to reckon with in terms of search engine marketing.
Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo! because Microsoft needs it. And Microsoft will do it simply because it can. From a search engine marketing standpoint, it makes an awful lot of sense. Yahoo! has the charm, the savvy and the reach that Microsoft needs to give itself a chance to fight against Google in the online advertising and search arena, even if winning is a long shot. If the deal pushes through, Microsoft gets fatter and Yahoo! becomes a loser, but Google maintains status quo. In the search engine marketing arena, the only thing that changes is that there is another bigger alternative to Google.