SEO is crucial for any business present online. Nowadays this means almost every single one. Most purchases start with a query in search engine. If you want to get those customers, you need to focus on your visibility online. In order to do it you would need to perform various actions aiming at increasing your position in search engine rankings.
You might ask yourself on which search engine you should focus, as there are plenty in the market right now. You probably already suspect that Google would be the best choice, but is it still up to date in modern dynamic market?
The short answer is yes, Google is doing good and its competition is nowhere near it. Therefore, due to its popularity the competition present there is enormous, and one might think of trying luck, focusing on another search engines. While you should remember about other search engines, without Google you wouldn’t go too far.
Is google still the most popular search engine?
It definitely is. It´s enough to look at the statistics from this year. First of all, Google continues to be the nr.1 most visited website in the world some of its traffic even comes from people searching “Google” in other search engines. At this point Google doesn’t need to fear any competitors as it has 91% of search engine market share worldwide.
What´s even more important is the fact that 94% of all searches from mobile devices are on Google. Mobile searches are growing in numbers each year and might represent majority of all searches in the future. If we keep in mind that and the fact that Google has switched it strategy to “mobile first” indexing, we can clearly see that we simply cannot ignore Google in our SEO tactics.
Why you should focus your SEO on Google?
We already know that Google is the most popular search engine in the world, with almost no competition, considering the gap between them. This reason might be enough to convince anybody to focus on Google. Thereby there are many more factors that can be of your advantage if you decide to target this search engine.
First of all – Google Trends. This tool is extremely helpful while researching the market in order to develop your keywords, monitor competition and find out what people really want. Thanks to this you can find pout any customer trends, develop your buyer persona and see everything you can take advantage of. This tool, as suggested by its name analyze only Google searches. So, google might contain a lot of your competitors but it also gives you the tool to overcome this problem.
Another feature of Google of which you can take advantage are featured snippets.
You can adjust your content in a way that will likely put you in these features. Featured snippets are simply answering your potential client’s questions, leading them to the website with best answer. Best answer is the one that is specific, not too long and preferably contains some data and stats. Adjusting your content to the featured snippets gives you massive advantage over your competition.
Surprisingly even though google is so popular, the chance of positioning your website well might be higher than in the other search engines. It is because the industry is much more familiar with Google ranking algorithm due to its importance in the sector. This algorithm gets commonly updated and nobody knows it specifically, but there are some factors that are commonly believed to strongly influence the rankings.
Some of them are among others: backlinks, the time users spend on your website, mobile friendliness, speed and structure of your site. Through experience we are very much aware of what is an absolute must have for a well-positioned website in Google. Other search engines do it differently for example put more attention to images and graphics, and less to the links. Therefore, thanks to its algorithm, Google tends to provide searchers with most relevant and informative results.
Another factor that makes people stay with Google is routine. Internet users are so used to Google design that anything else seems inconvenient or unclear. At this point people treat Google as natural part of the internet. People do not like changes so majority of those who started browsing internet with Google will not change it.
What about others?
Obviously, there are other search engines in the industry, they might not be that big right now, but it would be irresponsible to ignore them. Some of them are also dominant in specific markets such as Yandex – Russia and Baidu – mainland China. So, unless you are targeting these markets, you should focus on Google, but be aware of the other search engines and constantly monitor the trends.
