Infographics: The search engines Google and Seznam on the Czech Internet #2019

03. 05. 2019 Autor Ladislav Kos

All of this, you will find out in our latest infographics. At the end of this article, you will find more information about how we collected and analyzed the data.

But now let’s move to the data:

In 96%, the pages of our clients were visited through Google’s and Seznam’s organic search. The remaining 4% are spread amongst Bing, Yandex and Yahoo.

Organic traffic from mobile and desktop devices

At the end of 2018, Google’s and Seznam’s share of organic traffic was 75% : 25%. This means that since our first analysis in 2014, Google’s share has grown by 28% at the expense of Seznam. At the beginning in 2014, the results were still in favor of Seznam with 53% : 47%.

The infographic below shows the total search engine share of Google and Seznam in percentage for all the different devices (desktop + mobile phone + tablet).

Organic traffic from desktop

In early 2019, the organic search traffic from desktop (i.e. PC and laptop) was 70% : 30% for Google. Here the picture is similar to the previous results: At the beginning of our survey in 2014, the shares were with 54% : 46% very close to one another. However, this already changed in the second half of 2014. Since then, Google’s share has increased steadily, whereas Seznam has lost around 5% of their total shares in the last one and a half years.

Why is Seznam stronger on desktop? One of the reasons might be that Seznam.cz is still the start homepage and browser of a significant number of users.

Organic traffic from mobile phones

The biggest difference between Google and Seznam appears in organic traffic from mobile phones. Currently, the share is 81% : 19% for Google. At the very beginning of our analysis in 2014, Google has shown a slight upward trend (56% : 44%). Since then, it has risen by 25%.

Another reason for Google’s better search results might be the fact that Google had its own mobile browser for a while. However, Seznam has just recently introduced its own mobile browser.

Google’s additional services, which are mostly or almost for free, may be another reason for Google’s better search share.

Organic traffic from tablets

The results for organic traffic from tablets are also in favor of Google. The ratio is 66% : 34% for Google. One the first sight, it seems as if Seznam is not performing poorly in this area. However, it should be mentioned that in less than 5%, our clients are searched from tablets. In addition, the proportion of organic traffic from tablet for Google has increased by 10% since 2014.

Mobile devices (mobile phones and tablets)

On mobile devices, the ratio between Google and Seznam is 80% : 20%. This trend follows more or less the same trend as in the category mobile phones, because they dominate here as well.

Conclusion

All results show that Google’s shares have increased, whereas Seznam has lost shares. This development has been evident for more than 5 years since we started to collect and analyze this data. We assume that this trend will continue but is likely to slow down in the future. According to our prognosis, Seznam’s share will stabilize and stagnate at around 10-15%.

Although there are still websites where Seznam has a bigger share than Google ‒ even quite a few ‒ they are disappearing more and more. Last year, for example, the share of organic searches for our clients from Seznam decreased from 14% to 11%. At the beginning of our analysis in 2014, the share was 47%.

Especially in small e-shops and websites that are aimed at an older audience, Seznam is still dominating the market. Therefore, we recommend continuing to focus on Seznam and measure traffic and other key metrics for both search engines when optimizing websites.

How did we collect the data?

In order to be as objective as possible and to identify trends, we examined quarterly developments and focused exclusively on organic searches. We did not consider the development of visitors and visits, because they practically overlap.

Which variables did we measure?

• Overall organic traffic from all devices (desktop, mobile phones, tablets)
• Share of desktop search
• Share of mobile phone search
• Share of tablet search
• Share of searches from mobile devices (mobile phone and tablet)

Data sample

The analysis is based on the data of our clients’ websites. In total, we analyzed 100 Czech websites with an overall organic traffic of millions of visits per quarter.

Although such a sample size is already considered representative, there are some aspects that could have affected the results.

This includes:

• Clients
  • size: all web page sizes were included in this analysis, but their distribution was not consistent
  • fields: clients from the field of e-commerce and others
  • different target groups
  • competitive environment
  • marketing activities of individual clients
• Search engine updates during the analysis period (January 1, 2014 – December 31, 2018)
• Status of on-page and off-page factors at the beginning and in the reporting period
• (SEO) activities on the websites during the analysis period
• Goals of the websites, settings or changes

Valuation method

For the evaluation of the data, we have decided to average the search engine ratios of individual customers. In the evaluation of the shares of individual search engines from the sum of absolute numbers of visitors, we came to very similar results. The results varied only by 1-2%.

Source table