You might have heard about DuckDuckGo SEO recently. And there might be many queries in your mind. Why should you invest your time and energy in an alternative search engine?
We’ll start with basic information and stats about DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is one of the emerging search engines. In addition, it is gaining more popularity every passing year.
- It boasts of a total of 81 billion all-time searches until now.
- Recently, it achieved a milestone with a record of 104 million searches per day in 2021.
Furthermore, It’s not difficult to implement a DuckDuckGo SEO strategy—just a little bit of the efforts, trials, and experiments. And you’ll be ready for the launchpad of DuckDuckGo.
We will cover all the required queries about DuckDuckGo in this article.
What is DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo is one of the newbie search engines launched in 2008. It is a privacy-based search engine that doesn’t track users’ search history like Google and other search engines.
DuckDuckGo operates quite similar to Google with instant answers, images, videos, and autosuggest features. It also uses apple maps and checks image licenses to differentiate between copyright images and free-to-use images.
Why choose DuckDuckGo for SEO?
It may seem obvious with Google having the lion share of 92.4% of the total searches, why will anyone go for DuckDuckGo SEO.
So, here are some of the irresistible features of DuckDuckGO.
Privacy
DuckDuckGo is is a privacy-focused search engine that even blocks the other trackers to track you. It doesn’t keep track of your social media activities, monitors your behavior, or keeps track of your political tendencies.
It displays the results based on the current queries, not on the previous questions. Clients looking for privacy-based searches must use DuckDuckGo.
Better than Google Incognito
Google Incognito may seem to serve the same purpose by allowing users to search in private.
Is it?
No.
It says by itself that your activity may be visible to your ISP, employer, or authorities.
But, with DuckDuckGo can feel safe as in your mother’s lap.
It doesn’t allow crawlers and cookies to keep on tracking you. And later display ads or website recommendations accordingly. DuckDuckGo no doubt earns through ads or affiliate links. It uses your present query for the same.
Avoid Filter Bubble
DuckDuckGo avoids the filter bubble of personalized search results. So, It doesn’t allow other sites to share your information or your search history.
Thus, DuckDuckGo is an all-in-one package for your expansion and growth.
Why is DuckDuckGo SEO important?
DuckDuckGo is a search engine of the awakened people who respect their privacy. And it is increasing its online presence in leaps and bounds.
With DuckDuckGo having considerably less market share of around 0.6%, you may think, why do we need to work on DuckDuckGo SEO?
But, this market share is substantial enough to sustain your business and increase your worldwide reach. DuckDuckGo has performed exceptionally well in recent years.
Can you imagine it has seen a rise of 56.84% from the year 2019 to 2020? On the other hand, the old players like Yahoo and MSN have seen considerably less increase in searches.
It is always advisable to invest your business in multiple fields. What will be its benefit? You will keep on getting genuine traffic from DuckDuckGo. Thus, it will ensure a continuous source of income through maximum leads.
Further, Google keeps on changing in Algorithm. Suppose you’re getting high organic traffic. And next day, there will be a substantial dip in traffic with a bit of modification of Google’s SEO strategy.
How to Optimize Your Website for DuckDuckGo?
DuchDuckGo believes that users are looking for answers and not just any random links. So, it fetches the content from almost 400 popular sources.
DuckDuckGo keeps on partnering with sources to give you the most relevant answers. When your presence is on different verified sources, it will shoot up your rankings considerably.
Top hacks and tips for optimizing your website for DuckDuckGo are:
Earn Quality Backlinks
The backlinks have always been underrated as compared to other SEO methods. It may be due to its name. But, search engines prefer it the most and take it as quality votes from other websites.
The same rule applies to DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo mentions on the help document about the backlinks.
It recommends that you can get rankings by getting links from high-quality sites like Wikipedia. On the other hand, other factors may keep on changing with time.
User-friendly SEO practices
Is it possible that we can achieve good rankings without keeping users first?
We can always take SEO lessons from previous search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Some of the user-friendly SEO best practices are:
- The website must be responsive on all digital devices. Let it be a smartphone, iPhone, tablet, or desktop.
- The loading time of lesser than four seconds reduces the bounce rate of your website.
- Improve user interactivity with better site architecture. Further, make your site navigable with well-written content having h1, h2, h3 tags, bullet points, and visual assistance.
For even better optimization of your website, you can contact SEO experts as well.
Keyword Optimization
Keywords are the strong pillars on which any content stands. Let it be any website from blogs to eCommerce. You can’t afford to go away from words. So, how can you select the keywords?
- Find the keywords used by your competitors having high traffic?
- What are the key concern areas of my customers?
- And how can you give the best solutions to them?
- How can you cover your industry-specific keywords?
After selecting your keywords, it’s time to use them. You can design content giving solutions from all the more from different perspectives.
Or, you can fill the content gap in your service area.
Use Structured Data
Search engines love structured data to the extent that it could take your rankings to higher levels. DuckDuck discovers the search intent with the help of structured data. You can use JSON language to add tags along with your HTML code. The content or other embedded elements will not be any random words. But, you can specify them with particular tags.
For example, in a book review website tag the author name, the book’s title, launch date, and everything. DuckDuckGo will display information relevant as per the search.
Update content on other search engines
Aren’t we talking about DuckDuckGo SEO here?
So, why update content on other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. DuckDuckGo performs vertical searches.
Here comes the most exciting point! DuckDuckGo maintains its principles of protecting your privacy while partnering with others. And it doesn’t share any of your information.
Hyperlocal searches
The good news is that you can optimize your site for hyperlocal searches. DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your actual location as that of Google. It uses IP addresses to determine your approximate location.
So, while you’re generating your content mentioning major landmarks near you, cover all the significant places around your geographical location. It will enable you to include maximum online searches.
Moreover, DuckDuckGo partnered with a privacy-savvy platform, i.e., Apple Maps, in 2019. It is how DuckDuckGo uses apple maps to display relevant results. So, you can update your location on apple maps listings.
Add your bangs
Bangs is quite a new word for those who are not familiar with DuckDuckGo. Bangs are the shortcut links to other sites.
For example, for Amazon, it is !a, for Wikipedia: !w, and many others. It is an excellent aid for users who want to go to other websites through DuckDuckGo directly.
The good news is that you can also make your bang with DuckDuckGo. You can create bangs similar to the ones shown in the figure so that users may remember your company shortcut.
Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO is like airplane travel on the route of DuckDuckGo SEO. It will give you speedy and precise results. More than 50% of DuckDuckSEO users are through Mobile.
Users make use of the DuckDuckGo browser same as that of Firefox, Safari, and others. So, it’s worth investing in Mobile DuckDuckGo by working on these parameters:
- Optimize the number of images and videos while compressing their size.
- Allow DuckDuckGo to crawl on your website and avoid any unnecessary pop-ups.
- Use AMP for faster loading of pages on Mobile.
- Use shorter sentences and simple words to improve the readability of your content.
- Leave enough space between different web elements for improving user experience.
- Arrange tabs and menus at the top, bottom, and side to avoid the messy looks of the website.
Conclusion
Let’s wind it up.
We covered the relevance of using DuckDuckGo as compared to other search engines. DuckDuckGo is a direct route to maintain your information private.
What’s in store for digital marketers here?
They can benefit from small yet relevant viewers that spend a more extended period on your website. So, it’s highly probable that they could be your target buyers.
Regarding SEO, it is evident that quality backlinks, structured data, keyword optimization, and user-friendly websites are the most effective SEO strategies that work wonders for DuckDuckGO.
So, how are you going to implement DuckDuckGo SEO?