Google is the most popular search engine, but it’s not the only one you should consider in your SEO strategy. There are several other commonly used search engines that are worth targeting, and failing to optimize for them could cost you potential site visitors.
Fortunately, optimizing for other search engines is very similar to optimizing for Google. You don’t have to change much about your strategy, but some small adjustments could help you reach a wider audience.
Why Optimizing Beyond Google Is Important
Google is still the most frequently used search engine by far, but their market share is slowly declining. Meanwhile, the market share for Bing and other search engines is slowly but steadily rising. Bing’s market share is currently around 6 percent, and Yahoo’s is about 3 percent. This isn’t close to Google’s 87 percent market share, but if this trend continues, Google may have a direct competitor in a few years.
One search engine to pay particularly close attention to is DuckDuckGo, a site that uses privacy as its selling point. Although DuckDuckGo only has about 2 percent of the market share, their user base is growing quickly. As of January 2021, the search engine surpassed 100 million search queries per day, and that number will likely increase rapidly as concerns rise about Internet privacy.
It’s important to understand your target demographic when considering other search engines. If your site is aimed at younger Internet users who are aware of data collection and tracking, optimizing for DuckDuckGo may be especially helpful. Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines may be more popular than Google for visual searches, too, which you should keep in mind if your site is image-heavy.
How to Optimize Your Site for Other Search Engines
You shouldn’t have to sacrifice your Google rankings to perform well on other search engines. The strategies that work well for Google should mostly work for other platforms as well. However, there are a few key ideas to keep in mind.
With Bing, social media signals may play a stronger role in your search rankings than they do with Google. Therefore, it may be wise to expand your social media presence and focus on increasing shares, likes, and engagement on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Yahoo’s search engine mostly uses Bing to power its results. If your site ranks well in Bing searches, you will probably also perform well with Yahoo.
Because of DuckDuckGo’s approach to privacy, you may have to adjust your targeted search terms if you want to appear in a local SERP. DuckDuckGo can estimate a searcher’s location, but they don’t know exactly where they’re located. Searchers may include more specific geo-qualifiers to their query to get local results, which means you may benefit from targeting highly specific location-based queries.
As the search engine market shifts, don’t forget about the other search engines beyond Google. Keep an eye on the market shares for the major search engines, and research which ones your demographic is the most interested in. Most search engines follow a similar pattern, but accounting for their small deviations from Google’s ranking system will help you perform well across the board.
ENX2 Marketing Can Help You Rank Better on all the Major Search Engines
Sure, you want to rank well on Google, and that’s where our primary focus is too. But we pay attention to all the major search engines and make sure your website is optimized properly for Bing, Yahoo, and the emerging DuckDuckGo search engine too. Call us today if you would like our help with SEO and growing your business in the organic search results.