SEO on Russia’s Leading Search Engines (Yandex) | Digital marketing trends blog
Russia boasts the leading online market in Europe as far as the Internet users are concerned however this market is not very well known in the Europe, United States, and Asia, so in this article we will provide comprehensive information regarding the search engines and SEO techniques used in Russia. As per a study by comScore, Russia has largest number of Internet users in Europe. The spread of Internet to the different regions of the country has led to a phenomenal growth in the Internet users in Russia in the last few years.
A study conducted by Yandex on the growth of Internet in the Russian regions revealed that over the last there years, the monthly audience for mobile Internet has nearly doubled and the regular Internet users have also increased by fifty percent. As per May 2018 stats by the domain name registrar Nic.ru there are more than 50.74 million registered domain names having the .ru domain extension.
Yandex – The Most Popular Search Engine In Russia
The search engine market in Russia is dominated by its local leader Yandex and followed by other search engines such as Google, Bing, Rambler, and so on. Yandex came into the picture in 1997 and before this time there were other search engines used in Russia such as Rambler which was founded in 1996 and soon lose its shares and partnered with Yandex to in 2017 to show Yandex results in its search. Another search engine that captured the Russian market before Yandex was Aport, also founded in 1996.
The biggest competitive advantage of Yandex is that it understands the Russian culture and language like no other; and it also offers a plethora of successful web services for Russia, including:
Vertical search include video, music, images, maps, news, people search, product search (Yandex.Market) etc.; while the range of services include calendar, mail, photos, web-analytics system (Yandex.Metrika) payment system (Yandex.Money), and many others.
In 2011, Yandex made an IPO on NASDAQ as a public company and since it is now trying to foray into new markets. In its endeavor to get global, Yandex has also launched a Turkish search engine replete with services such as maps and traffic jams.
Another key feature that makes Yandex stand out from the crowd is that it contains organic search results, vertical search information, paid contextual links, and so on. The revenue earned from the paid searches alone amounted to $181,4 million, accounting for nearly 85 percent of the company’s entire revenue. This is the only search engine which offers Internet users to compare the search results from other search engines directly in the serp page.
Google – The #2 Search Engine In Russia
Google started its company in Russia quite late in 2006 and started slowly working its way through improving the quality of web search and boosting the number of localized services on offer. At present, the share of Google is three times less than Yandex which dominates the market with monthly unique users more than 32.5 million as of March 2012.
Russia is perhaps the first country where Google launched its first ever offline advertising camping using billboards in the subway and on streets, but it didn’t help much. The third important player in the market is Search.mail.ru which earlier used Yandex search algorithm but after 2011, the search engine started combining its own search algorithm with the Google results.
SEO Market In Russia
The SEO market has gradually evolved with time and today the industry is estimated as more than$250 million. From the days when promoting a website took about two to four weeks and involved buying links in bulk quantity to the present day when the market is slowly shifting to the payment for SEO services, the industry has seen phenomenal growth. There’s another popular SEO model where the client has to pay for the amount of traffic generated from organic search results.
Similar to other SEO markets around the world, the search engine optimization techniques and search engine algorithms have been subject to change as per the need of the time. Initially, the focus was on text optimization, then to decrease the pressure for optimization, introduction of linking factors, and then the incorporation of social network tools for SEO advantage.
Over the years, Yandex has introduced several ranking algorithms and search engine formulas such as MatrixNet, and the Paid Links Policy to reward the efforts of the webmasters and keep the search engine clean to foster a good web experience for the users.
In order to improve website rankings in Russian search engines the webmasters need to design the structure and content of the site based on the target keywords found on wordstat.yandex.ru service.
Another effective method to boost the health of your website is to add it to Yandex.Webmaster and this will enable you to view the complete information of your website and make any necessary changes to rank high on Russian search engines.
