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Don’t let the name confuse you, DuckDuckGo isn’t playing around. This nine year-old search engine is doing things differently, and giving Google and Bing a run for their money.
DuckDuckGo is the search engine for users looking to “take back their privacy”. The website doesn’t track, store, or share any of your personal information. Since they’re not collecting any user data, there is no ad targeting.
However, this doesn’t mean that digital marketers shouldn’t be paying attention to DuckDuckGo. This search engine should be catching eyes of SEOs, and here’s why.
DuckDuckGo is experiencing rapid growth in search queries
According to a study by Smart Insights, DuckDuckGo has been experiencing rapid increases in the number of monthly searches. The website currently receives an average of 14 million searches per day.
While this hardly poses a serious threat to Google’s majority share of the search market, the rate of DuckDuckGo’s growth is noteworthy for SEOs. If the site continues to grow at the same rate it has in the past 5 years, then it should reach 150 searches per day by 2022. This is nearly 30 million more than the 122 million daily searches received by Bing and Yahoo, sites which are not expected to see the same growth in coming years.
No Paid Search
DuckDuckGo features no advertising platform. Since there is no potential for PPC or Paid Search campaigns, all search traffic is organic. This means that getting seen on this search engine is entirely up to SEO. Additionally DuckDuckGo’s SERP is more of a feed than a page, showing 30 search results per fold. This, amongst DuckDuckGo’s larger differences from other search engines, calls for a unique SEO strategy.
Search Engine Optimization Techniques
In addition to all the typical SEO best practices and quick fixes, there are a few things that SEO’s should keep in mind when coming up with a SEO strategy for DuckDuckGo.
1. Keep it User Centric
This privacy-focused search engine is all about creating an experienced centered on the user. Neil Patel suggests that you should start by making sure your website does the same. For SEO, this means going back to basics. Create a website with high functionality, a clear message and sharp design, and low bounce rate. Give your audience an awesome user experience and you will be rewarded.
2. Create Healthy Backlinks
DuckDuckGo prioritizes sites with healthy and relevant backlinks. This means using white hat SEO techniques to build high quality links to your site around the web. Achieve this though digital PR, consistent blogging, and creating a highly engaging social strategy to get your audience talking about your brand. The leg work will pay off in the SERP.
3. Think Local
Because DuckDuckGo does not track any user information, they don’t know your location as precisely as Google does. The search engine only has a general idea of where a user is located based on their IP address. Because of this, users are more likely to include keywords in their search queries related to location in order to find local results. This means SEOs should do the same, and add location specific keywords in their headlines to get found easier.
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