What About the Other Search Engines?
Should you be focused only on Google? What about the other search engines?
The explosion of smartphones and the internet has tremendously upsurged the need of every business to have an online presence. The advent of the internet has changed the face of every business industry, thus, making business development executives evaluate and strategize their marketing plan to accommodate better digital marketing.
In a bid to stay ahead of the competition, many business strategists make the expensive mistake of relying solely on Google while planning their SEO.
What if the ‘giant search engine’ introduces a new algorithm that faults and penalizes your website tomorrow? How long do you think it’ll take you to recover? Maybe months, or years — who knows?
Simply put, it’s dangerous to rely on a single source of search engine traffic. Don’t make that mistake!
Unarguably, Google is a great search engine for Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and every other thing in between. Google also has the enormous potential of growing a business; and so does other powerful but unsung search engines we enjoy putting on the backburner.
They do exist!
There are many search engines on the internet; Google is just one amongst the hundreds of search engines that exist.
Every search engine has a unique hidden feature that distinguishes it from its competitor. Search engine algorithms aren’t all evenly distributed and straight-forward; since they are machine learning algorithms that are proprietary.
While Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other general purpose search engines might share some characteristics and also have varying page ranking factors that are recognizable, there exist several factors that aren’t in the public domain yet; of which we’ll never be able to recognize.
One size does not fit all
Each search engine has different views on what they consider a black-hat SEO. What Google’s algorithm flagged as a black-hat SEO is probably what Bing’s algorithm might find as a white-hat SEO; so each search engine penalizes differently.
The latest report from Net Market Share (in terms of use of search engine) revealed that Google has the highest search engine market share of 74.8% while Baidu, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex have a market share of 11.32%, 8.08%, 3.37%, and 1.26% respectively.
Ask, DuckDuckGo, Naver, AOL and Seznam occupied the 6th – 10th position with a market search of 0.56%, 0.29%, 0.06%, and 0.04% respectively.
We all know Google isn’t going to lose its market share anytime soon, but the earlier you realize that many people prefer to use different search engines other than Google, the better you’ll understand the need to position your business to reach millions of potential customers that are searching for the services you offer via other search engines.
Of course, capturing the highest market share in the search engine market with 74.8% has further reinforced that Google doesn’t lead the search engine market, it dominates it. However, other search engines shouldn’t be ignored.
Still undecided on the search engine to concentrate on first? Many SEO experts believe that Google should come first since it holds the largest market share in the search engine market. I think that the decision to start with Google makes more sense because most of your Google SEO efforts will work just fine in helping other search engines to understand your site content with ease. Notwithstanding, other things will be different; especially when building an SEO strategy to reach potential customers that use various search engines.
Let’s explore other options to see what lies beyond the wall, shall we?
Baidu
Baidu, the Google of China, as they call it started its Japanese language search service, run by Baidu Japan, the company’s first regular service outside of China.
According to Internet World Stats, Baidu is the most popular search engine in China, controlling 61.6% percent of China’s search market. Robin Li creates it in the year 2000. As of September 2015, Alexa estimates that the percent of global Internet users who visit baidu.com is at 5.5%; a huge number when you consider that the global digital population is estimated at 6,767,805,208.
Bing
Bing is a Microsoft’s search engine is the second most popular search engine in the world, with 8.088% of the search engine market. Bing often gives twice as many autocomplete suggestions than Google does. Bing can predict when airfares are about to go up or down if you’re searching for flights as well.
Yahoo
I think everyone knows the story of Yahoo. To think there was once a time Yahoo turned down an offer that would have legitimately sealed their stance as the current search engine giant today! Well, thanks to Yahoo for turning down the offer when Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google) tried to sell off the company for a little sum of $1,000,000 in 1998. We wouldn’t have known what Gmail is if that deal was a success.
Despite having a good head start and far more resources, Yahoo! Mail lost to Gmail, Yahoo! Answers lost to Quora, and Yahoo!’s Flickr lost to Instagram.
Things fall apart, and that indeed is the synopsis of the whole ‘Yahoo story.’
Yahoo! is still fairly popular among those who want an aggregate website that lets them do multiple things.
Yandex
Yandex, on the other hand, is a popular search engine in Russia with about 55% of total Russian search traffic, closely followed by Google. The search engine is also popular in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a good search engine that doesn’t retain its user’s data. Unlike Google search engine, this search engine won’t spy or track you since it stores no user’s data. If having privacy while surfing the net is your priority, then this search engine is just what you need.
When it comes to search engines algorithm, what is sauce for the goose is not always sauce for the gander! It’s also important to re-emphasize that SEO goes beyond Google!
That favorite search engine you love to hate might probably hold the keys to your business growth.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
If you haven’t started to diversify your SEO strategy to capture other search engines, then the online presence of your business is still susceptible to myriads of unprovoked attacks from Google. To safeguard your business, as the old saying goes don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
If you aren’t shrewd enough to make a conscious effort to avoid the side effect of over dependency on one search engine as your traffic source, then you’re likely towing the path that will lead to the overthrow of your business.
