When hiring a marketing agency, they may be able to offer you the services of a search engine optimization (SEO) expert. SEO focuses on ensuring that your website ranks highly on internet searches, meaning that new clients can find your business easily.
Whilst you can hand over the actual optimization to the experts, it’s important to have background knowledge to make your partnership as beneficial as possible. It is a good idea to know which search engines are used most, and how they may differ when it comes to where they will place your website and some keywords that you’ll hear used. Here, we take a look at the main search engines that you’ll want to consider.
Google accounts for 92% of users, and more than 3.5 billion searches are completed on the search engine every single day. It is important that your SEO specialist optimizes your web presence to account for this share of the market. For this reason, they will most likely use Google Analytics, and should be confident in optimizing your web pages to rank highly on Google.
Google’s algorithms are sophisticated and will weed out keyword stuffing, broken backlinks, paid-for links, and irrelevant content. Google has been around for more than two decades, and is one of the largest, most powerful companies in the world, which means that any website hoping to get a good ranking on their search engine results needs to adhere to their regulations and methods.
Bing
Bing is the second most used search engine worldwide, and yet only accounts for less than 3% of the market. Bing’s algorithms are similar to Google’s in that they won’t allow black hat SEO practices, but there are enough differences that mean even a talented SEO specialist will have to work hard to optimize for both search engines.
One example of this is that meta tags do not count on Google, but they are important when it comes to Bing. Luckily, they won’t affect Google’s search engine rankings at all, negatively or positively, so it’s fine to use them when you’re aiming your work towards Bing.
Additionally, Google counts the quality of backlinks, and attributes different points and worth to different suffixes, such as .net and .org. Bing, however, takes quality and quantity into account in a more balanced view, and does not have the same stipulations around suffixes. This could mean that your company’s website does better on Bing than Google if your backlinks meet those criteria. Knowing these differences can ensure that you use your time and energy where it will actually be useful.
Bing also powers Yahoo, which is the third most popular search engine in the world. Yahoo is a recognizable brand name that many people trust, and using Yahoo may be more popular in some places than in others.
Other search engines
Other search engines will be used in smaller amounts than the major players, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be aware of them. DuckDuckGo is popular, as is Ask.com, which is the new iteration of Ask Jeeves, which was popular in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Some countries may use regional search engines. For example, Baidu is the most used search engine in China, and Yandex is the preferred choice in Russia.
Your SEO specialist will have a detailed and thorough understanding of which search engines are best for your uses. If there is a search engine that is preferred in your industry or with your client base, then your SEO specialist will know about it and should factor that into their plan for your web presence.
To sum up
When we talk about search engine optimization, most people are referring to optimizing for Google. It accounts for a huge percentage of searches worldwide, and the brand’s name is so synonymous with searching for answers that “Googling” is a term in the English language.
However, a solid marketing strategy will take into consideration the range of customers you’re trying to reach, and adjust accordingly. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that you are aware that Google may not be the only search engine you need to think about.
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