One of the keys to defining our international SEO strategy is knowing which are the most used search engines in the world. To do this, we must previously have a well-defined strategy and know the origin of our target audience.
With all the above information we will be able to focus SEO techniques and efforts on the most used and not on others and, therefore, improve and increase the traffic of our website.
Most used search engines in the world
Ordered from highest to lowest by market share, as of today and according to Gs statcounter, the most used search engines in the world are the following:
- Google. Market share of 91.31%. It is the most used search engine in most countries.
- Bing. Market share of 3.08%. It is the Microsoft search engine.
- Yahoo. Market share of 2.81%. The use of this search engine has been progressively decreasing over time.
- Baidu. Market share of 0.82%. Used in China.
- Yandex Ru. Market share of 0.34%. Used in Russia.
- Others. Market share of 1.64%.
As a curiosity, you can see a graph of evolution over time of search engines most used:
What search engine do they use in each country?
Once we are clear about who our target audience is and where it is located, it will be necessary to know the most used search engines by country to focus our efforts on them. It is useless to have a good positioning in the Russian search engine Yandex.ru if our target audience is Spanish-speaking.
To find out which search engine is used in each country, we can use the previous tool by selecting the “Edit Chart Data” option.
This tool will also allow us, and if we have it, to orient our marketing strategy much better since we can obtain which social networks are most used in each country and other statistics such as web browsers, screen resolution… etc.
The tools that allow us to know this information obtain data mainly from two sources, spying on user data while they browse and purchasing data from different ISPs or service providers.
How to obtain a list of search engines by country?
We will continue using the previous website which, as we have said, is a powerful tool for analyzing web traffic. The steps to obtain a list of the most used search engines by country are:
- We must go to “Search Market Share”. A graph will appear showing the evolution over time.
- We select the “Edit chart data” button.
- Within “Statistic” we select all the “Search Engine” options.
- Within “Region” we select the region we want, for example, Russia.
- Within “Chart Type” we select the type of chart, for example, lines.
- We choose the desired period of data.
- Finally we select the View Chart.
Additionally, the tool allows, in the search engine graph, to export the data to an image, CSV or embedded HTML.
In this comparison of search engines between Spain and Russia we can see that the predominant search engine in Spain is Google while the main ones in Russia are Yandex and Google.
From both points it follows that if we want to position ourselves in Spain we must focus mainly on Google and secondarily on Bing and, if we want to position ourselves in Russia, we must focus mainly on Google and Yandex.
As you can see, the international SEO strategy will depend on the countries where we are going to be present. The important thing is to dedicate the majority of effort to the predominant search engines in the country of our target audience.
