Continuing the theme from buybigtires' post at the beginning of the week about raising awareness for your favourite non-profit, I wanted to bring up Everyclick, a search engine where every search you do raises money for charity. This kind of charity-supporting search engine is another easy way of supporting your chosen cause (assuming you don't mind getting your search results from Ask...). As buybigtires said:

The web/tech community tends to be a helpful, compassionate bunch, who have great zeal for sharing knowledge and promoting various social and political ideals.

Everyclick are just launching a new advertising campaign in London with billboard ads, a PR campaign, etc., which has led to some discussion about them here in our office. Unfortunately, there are some execution issues that are holding them back online. I don't know about you, but I hate to see charities missing out when they shouldn't. It's all very well to laugh at businesses doing daft things, but when it's for charity... Well, I just thought someone should step in.

At the time of writing, Everyclick aren't ranking for their own name on Google, and I believe that this indicates that there are larger issues which are stopping them from ranking for a lot of more generic terms and preventing them from achieving the growth they could. Growth for this kind of service is going to hinge largely on word of mouth, and I think it is crucial that they gain as much market share as they can as quickly as possible. During an advertising blitz, many people will turn to their current search engine to find them, and even more will remember the concept, but not the name. The fact that they aren't ranking for their own name (or, in fact, any search you might try if you had seen one of their ads but hadn't remembered all the details) means they will lose a lot of traffic and the growth they desperately need to get the ball rolling.

The brief summary of the problem is that they have dreadful duplicate content issues, both on their own domain and on very strong charity domains. Some sensible usage of robots.txt, 301 redirects, and differentiation of their homepage from the pages they have placed directly on charity websites would make a world of difference (I have written more about the source of these issues and what they could do about them on the Distilled blog).

Given the breadth and strength of the charities they are working with (and from whom they could be gaining loads of search engine juice), they could probably rank for 'support [charity name]' for quite a lot of mid-size charities, and they certainly want to rank for 'charity search engine' and the like (that's what I'd search for if I couldn't remember the name). Either way, they should certainly be aiming to rank for 'everyclick' and 'every click'!

UK's eighth-largest search engine

Their PR brands them as the UK's eighth-largest search engine – sounds impressive, but the fifth-largest is Microsoft's Live search (splitting Live and MSN search apart), with 1.5% market share (source: Hitwise). Looking at some statistics of sites we control or have access to, over time periods where Google has sent 40-50,000 visitors, we have seen single-figure referrals (1-5) from Everyclick (where Ask is typically in the low hundreds).

Gaining enough traffic to boost these referrals will be crucial to their future growth, both because increasing their market share is part of the goal, but also because it will accelerate their growth. If they start consistently showing up in referrer logs for influential websites and the linkerati, they will begin to get a lot more traction, in the same way that Google grew quickly in the early days by making sure that they were the right answer for the kind of techie who recommended which search engine people should use to friends and family. In a social media world, a niche search engine like this will grow by appealing to the linkerati.

Disclaimer: we aren't currently doing any work for Everyclick, though I'd love it if we got some credit if they do take our advice!

Will Critchlow is a director of Distilled, based in London, and writes about online reputation issues, search marketing and sometimes lolcats on the Distilled blog.