Whenever the team members of the top SEO agency in Philadelphia at Studio x. are speaking to clients, or each other, about the worlds of search engine optimization, digital marketing, and analytics: Google is usually the most common thread amongst all of those elements.
And, yeah, for a good reason!
Google searches currently makeup about 87% of the total search engine market in the world, but their numbers have been steadily declining over the years.
With new and evolving issues like data sharing privacy, predatory digital advertisements, and more, fewer and fewer people are trusting the big names we have come to associate with the greatness accomplishments in and on the internet over the last decade.
But again, as the leading Philadelphia SEO experts, we wouldn't be doing our jobs if we weren't well versed in not only the world of Google but the other search engines out there too! After all, if you are ignoring some of the different ways that folks, especially internationally or on specific devices, are searching- you could be losing thousands (if not more) of users putting eyes on your site monthly!
With that in mind, we thought we would take today, just days after Safer Internet Day 2020, to discuss some of the other search engines out there, how they differ from Google, and where they can play into your digital strategy in the coming years!
For those not in the know, Bing is the official search engine of Microsoft. It is the default for their Edge browser, Internet Explorer, and anyone running a Microsoft OS device will have it as their default as well.
While Bing only reports in with about 3% of the world's total internet searches, Microsoft still makes up an incredibly large amount of the global device market. They must have consideration for your web presence.
So how does Bing differ from Google? Well, just as it can be darn-near impossible to squeeze answers out of Google and how they rank sites, the same goes for Bing.
It's clear that Bing, like Google, values content that demonstrates your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness on subjects, also known as EAT (which we just happened to write about a month or so ago RIGHT HERE). Don't keyword stuff your blogs, and work on quality link building to and from higher domain authority sites to help your Bing ranking rise.
One place that Bing seems to differ from Google is their value in social media. Google states that they don't take social media activity into ranking consideration (if that's true, it's hard to say for sure), but Bing has signaled, although indirectly, that it can. If your social media content has sharing amongst a broad enough swath of the net, it could positively impact your site rankings on Bing in the future.
I don't know about you, but when I first got a computer in the 90s, I would use Yahoo (on American Online, of course) to search for everything. Well that, and Ask Jeeves, but anyway. Yahoo, once a significant and very prominent search engine, now has less than 2% of global search share to its name.
Instead of relying upon its own directory, Yahoo starting to power search results by harvesting information from Google, and then Bing in 2010. And although Yahoo DOES have an independent website crawler, and ranking upon it shouldn't be ignored – you can mostly follow the guidelines and expectations for Bing, as listed above, when considering Yahoo optimizations. You'll find, as we do, that most Bing & Yahoo SERPs will look similar, at least when it comes to who is ranked where.
Considered relatively new in the search engine world (born in 2008), DuckDuckGo (here, DDG) separates itself from the pack by being the only search engine that does NOT track user data. Of course, given this lack of tracking, it can't sell information to advertisers, and also doesn't personalize search results based upon history, as the other big engines do.
If that's a good or bad thing, well, that depends on the user.
While DDG is sort of secretive about how it ranks sites, one would assume that if you follow the same guidelines for optimizing your website as you do for Google, you should fair well here. DDG has only a fraction of worldwide search percentage right now but has nearly quadrupled their queries in the past three years, and are starting to put their foot down predominately in the EU and Asian markets. It goes without saying that if your business has some traction, or would like to gain some, in those territories- that paying attention to your DDG ranking could be crucial.
Wait, YouTube, like the same place I go to watch cat videos, er, I mean, tutorials? Yeah, that YouTube. And we know we know we know it is owned by Google. Still, YouTube is establishing itself as an entity all to its own, with very different search results that could benefit your brand if you are making video content.
Over 1/4th of the world's population uses YouTube regularly, and it is becoming one of the most popular ways for people to listen to music on the go too. Of course, engaging audio-video content will need to be the focus of generating positive search results for your business on YouTube. Still, some of the very same optimization techniques used in/on websites can apply here.
You can set titles, descriptions, and tags that describe your content to users for terms that you hope to rank. Engagement with your video (views, shares, likes) will also signal to YouTube that you should be listed higher compared to competing videos.
Not to mention, if you have a YouTube channel for your company, you can also cross-post your video ON your website, your social media, and in other places too. Embedding your blogs and website content with diverse multimedia is a great way to increase engagement, and the search engines usually look kindly and favor sites with video on them.
Last but not least, the place we all go to buy so much stuff is yes, pretty much a search engine too. As Google does, searches on Amazon can result in organically ranked product listings, as well as sponsored ones, and results are keyword based.
Amazon algorithms rank certain products over others based upon their likelihood to sell, if they are relevant, as well as review scores. They will back your product if they think it will sell well because that means THEY do more business as well.
Make sure to include relevant keywords properly, answer FAQs, supply product details and images across your Amazon listings to harness the power of this shopping juggernaut.
As we see, a search engine is not just a search engine, and while Google still dominates the spectrum, things are always evolving, and you must move with the tides to keep your site ranked well across ALL possible and applicable search engines.
For more information on the above topics, give the top SEO experts in Philadelphia at Studio x. a call today at (215) 255-6955 or CLICK HERE to use our convenient online contact form!