One of the most overlooked SEO sources of traffic is the smaller search engines, David and Goliath SEO. The giant, Google search engine is what most SEO specialists focus on, including me. It has maintained almost a monopoly for years now, supposedly at 85% market share as of Jan 2022 per Statista. But that might be incorrect and for sure coming to an end very soon.
Find more statistics at Statista
Statistics can often be misleading. For example, there are other variables of search engine data that Statista has not included in the calculations. Their calculation of search engine market share is based only on 5 of the giants:
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Yandex
But this evaluation does not include shopping searches on platforms like Amazon, eBay, and others. But the true David of the Goliath comparison is even smaller. With mobile taking over the internet, it has opened the doors for small specialized mobile application searches. I came up with the idea for this article while watching a news report about the baby formula shortage. The reporter recommended using Instacart, not Google. I then had a look and found many of these small shopping application search engines across the internet.
To list a few:
- Instacart – Do your grocery shopping at your favorite stores
- Nate – shop at any store online
- eBay – they have their own shopping application
- Target – shopping with the Target application
- Wish – shop directly with manufacturers
- Wanelo – online shopping mall with various stores
This is just the tip of the David and Goliath scenario that Google is now facing for control of the market share of searching. They also have to contend with some other giants that are not referenced as search engines but used as such. Local listing companies like Yelp, Superpages, City-Data, and many more which are primarily focused on citations.
Citations
A citation is any place your company NAPW (Name, Address, telephone number, Website URL) information appears together online, typically in an internet directory or business listings site. These are important because if you don’t come up in the places people are looking for companies like yours to have SEO in place, you are likely to get overtaken by the Chinese competitors that do. There are two primary varieties of citation: structured and unstructured.
- Structured citations are organized and come in NAPW fields being filled in once the record is claimed and typically appear in business listings.
- Unstructured citations are more like a mention in the context of an article than just a listing.
Citations in SEO are the cornerstone of every effective local SEO effort (and a great boost for non-local campaigns as well). Every SEO effort should begin with establishing your company’s internet presence. By establishing the core business directories you’re signaling to search engine giants that your company is legitimate.
Then, as you expand your business’s presence across more and more reputable online directories, you’ll get greater web visibility for your company, gain more backlinks from reputable websites, start collecting client evaluations, and establish your company as an “entity” in the eyes of search engines.
By focusing your SEO on this type of listing you are also improving your Google SEO. Google uses many variables in its algorithm and one of these is related links to your website.
Data Aggregators
Data aggregators are major firms that collect, disseminate, and sanitize consumer and corporate data from all over the internet. They are databases that gather and disseminate your company’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) data to search engines, marketing firms, publishers, and media websites.
Web crawlers may scan webpages and categorize data since most of the internet is public. These aggregators provide data to search engines, which they employ as a third-party source to compare and validate company data.
There are four key data aggregators in terms of SEO that we are aware of:
- Acxiom
- Data Axle AKA Infogroup
- Factual
- Localeze
You may either upload your company’s information to these data aggregators (and start creating an internet presence for your company) or utilize a citation building service.
These aggregators provide information to business directories (websites where you can acquire a citation, aka have your firm listed). The directory websites themselves do not (usually) scrape the web for information; instead, they rely on aggregators.
Summary – How To Do SEO 2022
So when doing SEO forget Google, Bing, and Yahoo as your primary focus. They have become so bloated with listings that it is almost impossible no matter how well your SEO is to make the first page with them if you are in a competitive market. Get listed with these smaller local directories, aggregators, and applications to supercharge your SEO and find the business leads you need to make money.
