Community Discussion - How diverse are your traffic sources, and do you optimize for DuckDuckGo at all?

[FeliciaCrawford]

In a post earlier this week, Roy Hinkis makes the case that SEOs should be focusing on attacking diverse traffic sources and harnessing the potential of social, sites like Twitch.tv and Buzzfeed, and new search engines like DuckDuckGo.

Have you had success in diversifying your traffic sources beyond the Big G? What are your thoughts on the up & coming DuckDuckGo, and do you have any personal experiences to share in optimizing for it?

[EGOL]

I am all for diversifying.   All for it.   But Google is sooooo good right now and the rest are sooooo puny.   I don't think that I should quit catchin' elephants on Google to try to figure out how to catch a few skinny toads on these other puny sites.  Half of those sites are going to be history in a couple of years, maybe sooner.

I've spent most of my life ignoring evangelists and I am old enough that I think that Google is still on my horizon.  If I was 40 or 50 or even 60, I might have a different attitude.   People under 40 are the ones who should be scared shitless if they havn't figured out that SEO should be given about five minutes per day and the rest of the day should be spent trying to make a website with something on it that someone will hang around to read, play with or look at.  If you can do that your visitors will do your SEO for you.

Maybe I am wrong, but it sure is fun. 

[RobertFisher]

Good discussion Felicia.

As an agency we tell all of our clients that SEO is a tool within a larger toolbox. With a question like this there are myriad approaches based on what the business type is. For example with Service Area Businesses (SAB's) everyone realized with the recent changes at Google and with Amazon Services, that the world is much more dynamic than they wanted to believe it is. 
If you were in the 7 pack for plumbers at number 5 today you may not be in it at all and need someone to look at "More Places" in order to see you Locally.  With changes to GMB Local listings, changes to Adwords, the advent of Google Services, Amazon Services, etc. you have to start to ask: "What are you willing to pay to be found?" 
For any client we are optimizing for Google, pay some attention to Bing and, well, don't worry much about the others. We are suggesting things like Yelp with caveats where in the past we would not. Today one also has to consider app advertising, etc.

IMO as Google moves to monetize more and more of their property, they edge toward being the YP of this era. I mean this in the sense of 20 years ago many businesses felt they were forced to advertise with YP.  With that growth for Google and people potentially feeling marginalized by it, many more advertising mechanisms will open up and we need to be open to what those will be and to being willing to test them.

Thanks for good discussion question.

[donsilvernail]

Great question!

What I have found through a few years of helping clients rank on Google is that all the small dogs follow the leader. There are so many aspects of optimizing for google due to algorithm updates and changing of times, that optimizing for other search engines seems silly. Optimizing for Google seems to lift my clients on yahoo and bing. The traffic discrepancy is huge though. If 60% of organic traffic comes from google then the other 40% is divided between the other search engines. I am always surprised however to see rises in Google traffic will correlate to rises in other search engine traffic as well. I do also see the occasional duck duck go but most of the people I have talked to in my circles have not even heard of it. So why optimize for it. Its a near guarantee that most traffic is coming form Google Anyway.

[EGOL]

Donald, you are exactly right.  If you optimize for Google you automatically get at least some benefit on other search engines.

Imagine if another search engine gave explicit instructions for optimizaiton.  How much would they differ  from what you already do for Google.  Probably not much, is my guess.

Yesterday one of my sites received 187 visits from duckduckgo.com.  That was about 0.2% of my traffic.  I didn't do a thing to get that traffic.  It fell from the sky.