Is Google the Only Search Engine You Should Worry About?

Google. Bing. Yahoo. DuckDuckGo. Ask.com. Baidu.

That’s not a string of random nonsense words. It’s the beginning of a very long list of available search engines.

That’s right—Google isn’t the only search game in town. But should deathcare marketers spend time worrying about how the other search engines might index and rank content?

Not really.

Google has more than 92 percent of search market share. In other words, more than 9 out of 10 search queries are entered via Google.

In second place is Bing, with around 3 percent of search market share. Everyone else has 1 percent or less. Given these figures, optimizing content for any search engine other than Google doesn’t make sense. You might create a page that only ranks well on one search engine with a 0.05 percent market share—which means you have content targeted to only a few potential searchers.

Another reason you don’t have to worry that much about all the other search engines is that what’s good for Google is typically mostly good for other search engines. Which is to say, if your content is ranking well in Google, it’s likely ranking well in other search engines too.

The one caveat to all of this is that you may want to optimize for specific search engines when you’re creating content for a segment of your audience that is likely to use those search engines first.

For example, DuckDuckGo attracted a lot of searchers with its strict stance on privacy a few years ago. Because it didn’t have a public policy on misinformation, DuckDuckGo was also seen initially as a free-speech search engine, drawing a lot of searchers who identified as conservative politically.

This type of information can be helpful to know when you’re optimizing content. In cases where your content is targeting a specific type of potential clientele, you may want to optimize for the search engines they’re using in addition to optimizing for Google.