In most countries across the world, Google-first SEO is considered highly important. It is because Google has the highest search engine market share of all. However, focusing only on the Google search engine is not always the best approach. Google might be the biggest search engine, it’s certainly not the only search engine people are using in different parts of the world. In this article, you will get to know about the rise of alternative search engines and why you need to optimize for them.
When you think of digital marketing or optimizing your website for SEO, these alternative search engines are equally important to grow your business or brand.
Major alternative search engines
Here are some alternative search engines you need to optimize for:
- Bing
Owned by Microsoft, Bing holds around 2.46% share of the search engine market in the world in December 2020. It is a default search engine for Internet Explorer and Microsoft’s Edge browser.
- Yahoo!
Yahoo! search engine started its journey as Yahoo! directory. Yahoo! also has its separate web crawler called Slurp. Although it is only a small contributor of around 1.59% in the search engine market, its existence cannot be ignored.
Being a part of Bing’s search results, not much consideration is given while optimizing for Yahoo!.
- DuckDuckGo
Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo search engine uses information collected by its DuckDuckBot from more than 400 sources, including Bing, Wikipedia, and Yahoo!.
In 2019, DuckDuckGo announced more than one billion searches on its search engine every month. Unlike Bing and Google, this search engine doesn’t track the users. So, it won’t personalize the search results as per your search history. But it does offer localized searches.
Reasons for optimizing for these search engines
Here are the two reasons to optimize other search engines:
- Google’s market share is slowly reducing
As per Statista, Google in April 2012 had 91.7% desktop search engine market share. However, it fell to 87.96% in October 2019. In this time period, Bing’s market share has increased from 3.5% to 5.26%.
Since Google dominates the search engine market, it doesn’t mean that it’s the only option. So, concentrating just on Google algorithms may mean many missed opportunities in so many other search engines.
- Target audience is not just engaged on Google
With increasing privacy concerns on Google, many people are opting to stop using Google search engine and moving to search engines that highly respect user data and privacy.
Moreover, Google is not the only search engine where all the audience is. As per what your audience is searching, they can be on other search engines as well.
How to do SEO for other search engines?
Given below are some major tactics to do SEO optimization for other search engines:
- Keywords, technical SEO, and on-page factors are important
Bing and other search engines don’t follow a complex algorithm like Google does. Since their search bots are not as smart as Google’s, you need to put in less effort to optimize for these search engines.
Meta keywords are important meta tags found in a website’s HTML code. They are helpful in understanding the content theme and so can easily associate them with your site using the right keywords.
- Build “Wikipedia-like” backlinks to get higher ranking in DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is an open source online platform that doesn’t track search and browsing history of the users. Hence, it provides better customization and control to its audience. This is why it contributes to the low bounce rate of 31%.
To get high rankings in DuckDuckGo, you need to have user-friendly website design. Also, work on link building and rely on Yahoo! as the major source of technology to get search results.
- Flashing websites and getting local works on Bing
Google dislikes flash websites and its algorithm doesn’t index its content. But there’s a different story on Bing.
Bing’s take on flash websites:
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), like Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, can enhance their visual appearance and functional ability of the website on Bing. If your RIA content cannot be read, it can further provide lower search ranking to a flash website. However, stay away from RIA navigational links – as they can prevent further crawling.
- Leverage schema markup
Leveraging schema markup (microdata) for a website in search engines can help search bots understand what your content is. This microdata also helps in figuring out overall relevance of your web pages in search results for improving CTR.
Is it worth investing in SEO for Bing/DuckDuckGo?
With Google’s depleting search market share, it’s certainly worth investing in SEO for alternative search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Although there is no guarantee that Google will take the lead forever, there are chances that other search engines may dominate the market in the coming years. No matter what search engine you optimize for, the quality of content is important to engage with your target audience and grow your business.
Conclusion
Website search engine optimization (SEO) is primarily done by many companies on Google, due to their dominance in the market. However, other search engines are also worth considering to expand your online presence while reaching out to more people.
