How and why you should try to rank in alternative search engines
When talking about SEO, most people only think of Google. This is understandable as Google is the absolute king when it comes to searching. Most companies and people think it’s a waste to try ranking in Yahoo and Bing.
I think these alternative search engines present an untapped opportunity. First of all, in the United States, nearly 15% of searches each month are done by a different search engine than Google. This means that potentially nearly 1 out of 10 people could find your website from a different search engine than Google.
Furthermore, because most companies ignore alternative search engines, you have less competition. Which means more opportunities for you to stand out with your website. Famous SEO expert Neil Patel even says in an article, that traffic coming from Bing is sometimes way higher quality than Google:
Bing traffic also might have a lower bounce rate. For Matthew Woodward, Bing traffic had higher quality than Google. And, the visitors viewed more pages and clicked more affiliate links, as well. — Neil Patel
Lastly, some search engines could connect you with a specific audience. Let’s take the privacy oriented search engine DuckDuckGo. My blog is mostly focussed on software development and online marketing, so I try to attract people interested in that. I think that a lot of internet professionals are more privacy aware than regular folks. In fact, some of my colleagues prefer to use Duck Duck Go for these reasons. By having my blog indexed by DDG, I can rank in the searches of a specific demographic.
Convinced? Let’s get started!
Bing
The process for getting your site indexed is pretty straight forward. Your website is probably already indexed by Bing. A big bonus point of getting indexed by Bing is that nowadays Yahoo and Bing share the same database. This means that for the costs of one, you get ranked in two search engines! Together Bing and Yahoo make up the bulk of the 15% market share that I mentioned earlier, so I think these two are a worthwhile investment.
If your site hasn’t been indexed yet, head over to the Bing webmaster tools. The interface is pretty similar to its Google counterpart:
Bing accepts the same XML sitemap format as used by Google, so you don’t have to do anything extra. SEO for Bing isn’t much different either. The most important points are:
- Bing cares more about quantity of backlinks than quality
- Bing really loves links from trusted institutions on .gov, .edu or .mil domains
- Bing favors exact match of keywords in the domain, meta description or page title.
For a more comprehensive guide, I recommend checking out this article by Neil Patel:
DuckDuckGo
Having your site indexed by DuckDuckGo is a bit more complicated than usual. I couldn’t find an official guide by them and reaching out offered no yield.
After some digging, I found out that DuckDuckGo has a partnership with the Russian search engine Yandex. Just like Yahoo and Bing, Yandex supplies the search results for DuckDuckGo. This means that if you want to have your website accepted in DuckDuckGo, it should be indexed by Yandex.
Luckily despite it being a Russian oriented product, they have an English language option for their webmaster interface. You can access it on https://webmaster.yandex.com/. There you can start the usual process of verifying your site and submitting your sitemaps. I did this too and after a while, it worked:
Like I said earlier, DuckDuckGo mostly caters a technology and privacy oriented audience. You could use this as a targeting option.
An other popular global search engine is the Chinese giant Baidu. However, I see no reason to have your site indexed over there, because they mostly serve a Chinese speaking audience, which means that your English web texts won’t rank.
Wrap up
After reading this article, you hopefully see search engines like Yahoo or Bing as an opportunity rather than a waste of time. I agree that Google should always be your main focus, but these search engine could provide significant supplement traffic or leads. If you liked this guide, make sure to like this post and share it :)
If you have questions or would like more content, reach out on Twitter:
About me
My name is Steven Braham. I’m 20-year-old Dutch web developer and online marketing specialist. In may 2017 I was awarded a place in the Next Web’s list of top 500 young Dutch IT talents.
