Search engines: The most important ones in Germany

Without a doubt, Google is arguably the most important search engine in the world. Bing + Yahoo (both from Microsoft) together account for just a fifth of Google's size.
 

An Overview of the Most Important Search Engines in Germany:

1. Google - The Unrivaled Number One: 
It's no secret that Google is the dominant search engine worldwide. In Germany, Google also leads with a market share of over 90%. Especially in mobile search statistics, Google faces little competition. While Bing has a decent share in desktop search, Google is still much more popular here as well.

2. Bing - The Challenger to Google:
Bing, though with a smaller market share, is a serious alternative to Google. Bing particularly excels in image search. Therefore, it's wise to not only focus on Google but also keep an eye on Bing.

3. Ecosia - The Environmentally Conscious:
Ecosia stands out with its sustainable approach. Advertising revenues are used to plant trees. For businesses focused on sustainability, Ecosia offers an interesting opportunity to highlight their values while being visible online.

4. DuckDuckGo - The Privacy-Conscious:
In an era of growing privacy concerns, DuckDuckGo is gaining popularity. This search engine places a high value on privacy and promises not to collect personal data. Nowadays, privacy is becoming increasingly important.

5. Yahoo - The Old Familiar:
Yahoo is one of the oldest search engines and still has some relevance in Germany. Especially in the areas of news and finance, Yahoo is used by a specific target audience. Optimizing your presence on Yahoo can be beneficial for certain industries.

Search Engines: How to Optimize for the Most Important Search Engines in Germany?

Should one only optimize their website for the most important search engine, Google? Is it even worthwhile to optimize for other search engines?

As the old saying goes: It depends.

It really does depend - and it's something each company needs to determine for themselves.

How do you find out which search engine is important for your company?

Analyzing visitors and the sites they are referred from can help with this. We not only use Google Analytics (or logfile analyzers) but also incorporate this information into our own software. The goal is to identify and capture new customer potential. This is a service that earned us the Industriepreis 2013 Best of Service & Dienstleistungen.

We determine the importance of individual visitors based on key referrers. For example, by tracking the path a user takes on your website, you can identify which topics are interesting to them. This information can be connected with the search phrases that lead to your web pages and the time spent on the site.

From this, we can infer interest. Combined with call tracking, this can be quite clearly linked to the advertising medium, allowing us to determine whether the visitor came from SEO, ads like Google AdWords, brochures, car advertising, posters at train stations, QR codes on products, and so on.

Never before has it been possible to analyze customers and potential customers to this extent.

If the analysis reveals that very interesting potential customers are finding your website through Web.de, spending a long time there, and call tracking shows which revenue these "few" customers generate, it quickly becomes clear that optimization for a search engine with just 0.05% market share can be worthwhile.

Traditional advertising agencies are often overwhelmed by such research. Few agencies can afford to have this kind of expertise in-house. This is why such suggestions rarely come from traditional advertising agencies.

Pure SEO service providers also lack the broader agency perspective on interaction with traditional marketing "values".

Therefore, you need an agency for visibility ;)