Optimize Your Website for Google & Other Search Engines Also for Better Reach

1. Optimize Your Website for Google & Other Search Engines Also for Better Reach A good healthcare digital marketing strategy for all search engines is vital to provide what your target audience wants and this will boost your ranking. Healthcare digital marketing has become more important than ever because patients are increasingly taking advantage of online resources before approaching a doctor, medical practice or hospital. This shows that it is vital for medical practitioners to have a strong medical SEO strategy to attract more potential patients and provide them quality service. Google is the most popular and highly used search engine. Therefore, search engine optimization of your website and updating it according to Google’s algorithm is essential. It helps to improve search engine ranking. However, optimizing your website for other search engines is also crucial to attract a broader audience. This is because your target audience may be on other search engines and not Google alone. Focusing only on Google and ignoring other search engines could mean missed opportunity in other search engines. As per Statista, in April 2012 Google was reported as having a 91.7% share of the international search engine market, whereas in October 2019 that fell to 87.96%. In the 2016 U.S. Desktop Search

2. Engine Rankings by ComScore, Google sites had 63.8% of the search share. This means that other search engines also have a decent user base. Bing has a rise in market share reaching over 20 percent and this rise was due to the following reasons: •AOL (now owned by Verizon) also ditched Google for Bing, as their default search engine. •Mozilla dropped Google and entered into a partnership with Yahoo. •The default search placement on Safari was rumoured to move away from Google. Apart from Google, there are other significant search engines. Bing:As per Statcounter 2019, Bing has 2.3 percent share of the world’s search engine. Bing is the default search engine for Microsoft’s Edge browser and Internet Explorer. Bing doesn’t have the same market as Google but there are certain demographics where it is more popular. It has statistically higher usage in some countries than others. Statcounter states that Bing holds 4.14% share of the U.K. search engine market, 4.36% of the Canadian search engine market and 6.11% share of the U.S. market. But Bing has less prominence in Asian and African countries. Bing is not lagging behind Google in improving their search algorithm. In November, they revealed that they had been using BERT in search results before Google. Bing now allows businesses to set up a brand page in Bing which will display an attractive search results page, accentuating the brand’s official website, social media pages and recent social media activities. Since it uses BERT, Bing also prioritizes user intent just as Google; poor content and keyword stuffing may be penalized by Bing. This search engine also favors authoritative, useful and clear content, according to its webmaster guidelines. Another thing to note is that just as with Google, Bing doesn’t favor link-building through link schemes and if you indulge in such practices, your website may be removed from Bing’s search results. Yahoo:Yahoo’s search engine was initially used as a way to search Yahoo’s directory and later Yahoo was used as any other search engine. Yahoo uses its own web crawler “Slurp” and Yahoo’s share in the global search market was 1.59 percent in December 2019. Earlier, Yahoo was a prominent player in the search engine market but over the years its popularity started dropping. Due to it being powered in part by Bing’s search results, there aren’t really any additional considerations to make when optimizing for Yahoo.

3. DuckDuckGo:This was launched in 2008 and it gathered in format ion by its own “DuckDuckBot” from over 400 sources including Wikipedia, Bing, and Yahoo. In Feb 2019, DuckDuckGo announced that around 1 billion searches were conducted through its search engine every month. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that does not track its users and due to the lack of tracking it does not provide personalized search results based on search history. However, they provide localized searches and in 2016 DuckDuckGo had 4,086,262,667 queries conducted on its site. In 2019, that number rose to 15,081,213,361. Experts opine that you can use optimization strategies similar to those used to optimize for Google. Ecosia:It has around 15 million active users. The search engine differentiates itself from the rest by donating over 80% of its profits to non-profit organizations focused on the environment and planting trees. Ecosia’s search results are from Bing’s data, other third party data, and its own algorithm. The results are highly influenced by Bing and optimizing for that engine should assist with ranking in Ecosia. As the society is becoming more aware of the human impact on the environment, it would stand to reason that this search engine’s popularity will increase. Baidu: Baidu has 67 percent share of the search engine market in China and 80 percent of the market share in mobile searches. It is the largest search engine in China. Optimizing content for Baidu is similar to optimizing for Google. However, there are some changes such as Baidu uses Meta descriptions as a ranking factor and will also strongly favor its own properties in search results, content designed to rank in Baidu must be written in Simplified Chinese. It has its own trends platform called Baidu Feng Yun Bang which is useful source of new and latest content ideas. Yandex: Yandex is the second largest search engine after Google in Russia. Both of these search engines share 100 percent of the market. Yandex focuses on elements such as keywords in URLs that Google does not and Yandex is not concerned with internal linking structures. Compared to Google, Yandex is slow at finding new content. To get around this issue, website owners can use Yandex Webmaster in a similar way to utilizing Google Search Console. Amazon:Amazon is primarily a shopping portal but it is essentially a search engine too. In 2019, Amazon’s search traffic reached 2.73 billion. Searching on Amazon will bring back a

4. plethora of product listings in which some listings are sponsored and others are organically ranked. The searches are keyword based and similar and it ranks products based on relevance and whether the products are likely to sell. They promote products that sell well and traditional conversion factors like reviews and engaging descriptions to help generate those first sales. Pinterest:Here searches are carried out based on keywords as well as Pinterest’s Lens. Optimizing your pins for keywords will enable Pinterest to serve them to relevant audiences. Pinterest Lens is an interesting development in visual search. By pointing your phone camera at an object when using Pinterest it can serve you related pins. Visual search is harder to optimize for than text-based searches. It will all come down to how similar the look of your pin is to the object being searched. YouTube: It has about 2 billion users and is used by over one-quarter of the world’s population which means that one billion hours of video are watched every day through its platform. It is also a keyword-driven search engine that dominates the search landscape. The video should be optimized with tags, titles and description. Engagement signals, subscriber numbers, and likes will also affect rankings and it impacts how well a video will rank in the YouTube search results. For medical businesses just as for other businesses, getting found online when potential patients type in a phrase or keyword is now more important than ever. So, to attract potential patients medical businesses should focus on all search engines and not just Google. This is because your target audience may not just be on Google, they could be using other search engines also and the aim of medical website is to provide optimum user experience on all search engines. So, having an effective healthcare digital marketing technique for all search engines is important to provide what your target audience wants and this will boost your ranking and provide the chance to grab top ranking on all search engines. (800) 941-5527