When working on your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, should you target more than one search engine, or just focus on Google?
At the heart of an SEO strategy is ensuring that a search engine views your site as credible, original and relevant to specific search terms.
This is what determines whether your ecommerce website appears on page one of the search results or page 20.
Throughout our series on SEO, we have consistently referred to Google, rather than other search engines. Does this mean you should focus only on Google, or target other search engines as well.
The truth is that Google is, without a doubt, the most important search engine on the internet. As of November 2012, Google accounted for more than 91 per cent of search engine usage.
The nearest search engine below Google was Microsoft’s Bing, which accounted for just 4.73 per cent, followed by Yahoo! with 2.27 per cent.
At the same time, it would be foolish to completely ignore all other search engines.
Although Bing only attracts five per cent of search engine traffic in the UK, that five per cent is still made up of potential customers.
But trying to optimise a website for several different search engines is complex – a more reasonable approach would be to look at the similarities between the two search engines, and see whether you can optimise for both at the same time.
There are quite a few similaries between Google and Bing in terms of SEO. What are some of the key similarities you can use in your SEO strategy?
1. Local results: both search engines offer local results for users. So consider focusing your content and optimisation on keywords related to location.
2. PageRank and links count a lot: good back-links to your website and internal links will both help improve your traffic, but it will improve your website navigation and help you rank higher on both Google and Bing.
3. Pay-per-click exists on Bing too: using the same model as Google AdWords, Bing offers an adCentre which helps you achieve click throughs and improves your SEO.
4. Keywords: all search engines depend on strong keywords. So try to make sure that your domain name includes a keyword that is directly related to what your ecommerce business offers.
It is therefore possible to rank on several search engines at the same time, which should be reflected in your SEO strategy.
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Another way of looking at this is to Optimise for the customer rather than the search engine. This can involve all of the above, but steer away from short term ranking focussed search engine strategies and towards providing good content for actual customers