Small businesses rely more on search engines - Hitwise

Smaller online retailers in the US are far more reliant in search engines to drive their traffic, compared with larger etailers, according to a new study from Hitwise.

Hitwise looked into the search traffic of companies in Internet Retailer’s top 500 list over the past two years, finding that half of merchants ranked 400-500 in the list received more than half of their visitors via search engines.

This trend is reversed for the larger etailers, with the majority of the top 100 relying on search engines for between 11% and 30% of their monthly traffic - just one in the Top 100 received 39% of traffic via search.

Other stats from the report:

• Only 13 of the top 100 etailers generated between 30% and 40% of all site traffic from search engines; 50 received between 20% and 30% of visits via search, while 6 etailers generated less than 10% of traffic in this way.
• Online only retailers, without the offline presence to attract vistors, relied on search engines the most, followed by catalogue based retailers, chain stores, and consumer brand manufacturers.  

[Source: e-consultancy.com - Sept 2007]

1. The 224 retailer in the list who sell online only averaged 64% of monthly visits from search engines, the 89 catalogue firms 30%, chain stores 28%, and brand manufacturers 27%.