Hotel SEO: The Top Global Search Engines Hotels Need To Know
When I write about SEO for hotels and resorts, I admit, I often write with Google in mind. It’s not that I’m totally biased, but Google is the top search engine in the world — and overwhelmingly so.
Think about it: How many times do you catch yourself saying, “Just Google it?”
You know you’ve “made it” as a company when folks start using your brand name as a verb — like Kleenex and Band-Aid in the U.S., or Hoover in the U.K. (That’s a concept known as anthimeria, by the way. Save that tidbit for your next Zoom trivia night.)
Although Google is the most dominant, it’s not the only search engine to consider when planning your content marketing and SEO efforts.
In fact, of the world’s most visited websites in 2020, five of the top 10 are some form of search engine.
Much of the same principles of search engine optimization actually apply across the board — write relevant/helpful content, have good website structure, and improve your trustworthiness via off-page SEO signals.
Depending on your audience, it doesn’t hurt to understand your options with alternative search engines. With over 4.54 billion internet users around the world, these other sites represent a unique opportunity to reach niche audiences in certain countries where Google isn’t the main choice.
Here are the top global search engines hoteliers should know about.
Top Search Engines in the World by Global Market Share
1. Google
In September 2020, Google’s worldwide search engine market share was 92.26%.
With a whopping 3.5 billion queries every day, Google is the most used search engine in the world — it's also the most visited website in the world, by far.
The main appeal to ranking Page 1 on Google for your desired hotel related keywords is, of course, the potential to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website.
The downside? Pretty much everyone competes for the same traffic!
Google’s overwhelming global market penetration means advertising can be highly competitive — and expensive.
These days, Google is far more than the search engine it started out as back in 1996. The company’s roster of products includes web-based email, cloud storage for businesses and consumers, a web browser, mobile phones and tablets, an operating system, self-driving cars, voice-activated digital assistants, and lots more in the works.
Google also owns YouTube. I’ll talk about YouTube as a search engine in more detail later in this article, but know that YouTube is one of the most important social media platforms for hotels.
2. Bing
The second-largest search engine in the world is Bing, but with 2.83% of global search engine market share, Bing still looks pretty small in comparison to Google.
That said, Bing boasts over 936,000 unique visitors per month — and in the United States, Bing’s market share is quite a bit higher at 6.67%.
Since Bing is owned and operated by Microsoft, all products produced by Microsoft — and/or running a Microsoft operating system — will have Bing as the default search engine.
Bing is by no means lagging behind Google when it comes to technology, either.
The use of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) which Bing actually claims to have started using before Google, means both search engines are making strides towards better understanding the user’s intent.
That’s a fancy way of saying, keyword stuffing and badly written content won’t do you any favors on either search engine.
3. Yahoo!
Over the years, Yahoo! has seen its popularity steadily decline. As of September 2020, it’s global share of the search engine market was 1.59% — though as with Bing, that number is actually higher in the U.S. with 3.39%.
The company was once considered quite successful, valued at well over $100 billion around the year 2000. While other tech companies surged ahead, most agree that Yahoo! failed to keep up. In 2016, Verizon bought Yahoo! for a paltry (all things considered) $4.84 billion.
Products like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Answers, and the image-sharing site Flickr have all been surpassed by more popular competitors like Gmail, Quora, and Instagram.
These days, the main thing to know about optimizing for searches on Yahoo is that… most of its results are actually powered by Bing.
4. Baidu
Baidu dominates China with over 74% of the country’s market share, while Google only gets a mere 2%. That said, Baidu doesn't have much influence outside of China — despite being extremely sophisticated, its global search engine market share is about 1.14%.
China has one of the largest and most strict online censorship operations in the world. For Western search engines like Google to enter the Chinese market, they must comply with strict and complex censorship laws and regulations.
Although there are some similarities between Baidu and Google for optimizing content, there are also a few major differences you need to consider.
Meta descriptions are a key ranking factor for Baidu. It will also strongly favor its own properties in the search results. For Baidu to have a meaningful impact for your hotel, you really need to have a Chinese registered website, with content written in simplified Chinese.
5. Yandex
Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia. It receives 55% of all Russian search queries (followed closely by Google), but has a worldwide search engine market share of just 0.5%.
Like most Slavic languages, Russian is highly inflected and Yandex’s ability to understand these search queries is what gives it the advantage over search engines like Google or Bing.
More than just a search engine, Yandex also provides a browser (YaBrowser), email, maps, news, paid advertising, and translator services primarily to the Russian market, but also including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Turkey.
6. DuckDuckGo
According to their own traffic statistics, DuckDuckGo receives 68,526,374 queries on average every day.
DuckDuckGo describes themselves as “The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.”
Users searching for a hotel using DuckDuckGo will not be shown any advertisements based on their search — this is quite the contrast to Google and Bing, who both provide user data to advertisers.
While their current worldwide search market share is just 0.5%, DuckDuckGo now has a partnership with Samsung and Brave, a privacy-focused web browser. Data privacy is a major, hot-button issue for an increasing number of consumers, so expect to hear more about DuckDuckGo in the future.
Honorable Mentions and Lesser-Known Search Engines
Google’s dominance is crystal clear. With less than 3% global market share, it feels a little nuts to consider Bing and the others I’ve just mentioned “major players” in the wild world of internet search.
Google is the winner for a reason.
Internet search boils down to solving problems — and at least right now, Google is the best at giving people the answers and information they want.
My goal for this article is to tell you about the other search engines available. So while we’ve covered the biggest, there are still a few other “honorable mentions” we haven’t talked about.
7. Ask
Not to age myself, but I think the first search engine I ever personally used might’ve been Ask Jeeves. 😬
The company rebranded as simply “Ask” in 2006, but for a while there in the 90s, Ask Jeeves was pretty iconic. Rather than behave like the search engines we know today, Ask was originally designed to be a more straightforward question-and-answer provider.
Since competing with Google proved to be an impossible battle, Ask gave up on its search technology in 2010. These days, its search results are actually powered by Google.
8. Naver
Is South Korea a target market for your hotel? If so, you need to know about Naver, known as “The Google of South Korea.”
Depending who you ask, Google claims between 70-85% of South Korea’s search engine market share — with Naver, a South Korean company, holding around 15-30%. Those numbers make Naver a significant challenger in this market.
I’ve written before about how hotels appear on Google’s search engine results page, but Naver does have some distinct differences. According to Search Engine Journal, Naver gives prominence to their own products, like:
Naver Encyclopedia — think of it like setting up a simple Wikipedia page for your brand
Naver Blog — Google loves when you blog on your own website, but Naver gives more prominence to content published through their third-party blogging product
Naver Café — Naver’s topic-based community forum looks a bit like Reddit
(Source: GIPHY)
9. AOL
Some of you have never heard the iconic internet dial-up tone — and it shows.
There’s really not much to say about AOL now.
(BTW, that’s “America Online,” for the uninitiated.)
AOL was an early web pioneer, but they, like many other internet companies, have been largely consumed by Google’s dominance.
These days, you’ll likely be more familiar with AOL’s acquisition of various media companies, like TechCrunch or The Huffington Post. AOL itself was acquired by Verizon Communications in 2015.
BRB, let me make sure my AIM away message is up. ~ * g2g mom needs comp * ~
10. Ecosia
The last alternative search engine I want to talk about is Ecosia.
While nowhere near the most popular search engine in the world, Ecosia shares a few things in common with the big names — and stands out with one major difference.
Like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia emphasizes privacy by not tracking your external activity or selling your data to advertisers. It encrypts all searches and doesn’t store any queries permanently. Microsoft’s Bing powers the actual search results and ads, but Ecosia does have its own algorithm, too.
The other thing that makes Ecosia pretty cool in my book is their commitment to the environment.
Ecosia uses revenue from ads to plant trees all over the world. 🌳
You can see how many trees the company has planted right on the Ecosia homepage — over 111 million and counting! — or watch your own personal counter tick up with every individual search.
Search Engines You Didn’t Know Were Search Engines
You might be surprised to hear that folks are searching for content outside of search engines, too.
Most of the top social media platforms have some sort of search capability to help users find their friends’ profiles, brand pages and promotions, content relevant to their interests, and so on.
As you get more comfortable learning hotel SEO, you can start applying optimization techniques to other, less traditional search engines — let’s talk about the two which will be most relevant to hotel marketing.
11. YouTube
Yes, seriously, YouTube is actually the world’s second-largest search engine.
YouTube has over two billion users, which means its used by over one-quarter of the global population. People all over the world watch 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day… NBD.
Since YouTube is also a product of Google, it’s not uncommon to see YouTube videos displayed at the very top of Google’s search engine results page.
While you might think of YouTube as a place to watch cat videos and makeup tutorials, it’s actually a powerful visual search engine — driven by keywords more than community.
Video optimization — let’s call it YouTube SEO — works similarly to website content. We can optimize YouTube videos for search by adding certain tags, titles, and descriptions. Good, optimized video content tends to have greater visibility against videos that aren’t optimized.
Social signals also play a part in the rankings, with engagement and number of subscribers both impacting how well a video ranks in the YouTube search results.
12. Pinterest
“Pinterest is not really a social media site,” is a hill I’m happy to die on.
OK, yes, I do include Pinterest whenever I talk about social media marketing for hotels — which is confusing, I know.
Part of Pinterest is social, sure — but most of the time, people use it very individually. Like, for finding recipes and outfit ideas, or planning their dream wedding. Sure, you can collaborate with other users on shared Pinterest boards, but most of the time, you’re just searching for (and saving) whatever interests YOU and you alone.
This is why I encourage hotels to think of Pinterest as a search engine first and “social media” second. I’ll get off my soapbox now.
More than 2 billion text-based searches happen on Pinterest every month. 85% of those happen on mobile.
Unlike YouTube, optimizing your pins for search — let’s call it Pinterest SEO — is quite different from optimizing web content for Google.
On Pinterest, engagement metrics and social shares matter more than backlinks and technical SEO. Thankfully, engagement is a natural byproduct of visually appealing content.
Also unlike traditional search engines, Pinterest users tend to be looking for lots of ideas, rather than one “right answer” or a single solution to their problem. Think inspiration over information.
Final Thoughts
Plenty of folks want to know, is there a better search engine than Google?
While this is a matter of opinion, you certainly DO have other options: Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia, for example. In other parts of the world, the most popular search engine might even be Baidu (China) or Yandex (Russia).
If you’re marketing a hotel online, I suggest starting with what you know about your target audience.
Google will be important to pretty much all hotels outside of China — and since most search engines function in a similar way, your best bet is to optimize with Google in mind, creating content that’s helpful, relevant, and readable.
For hotels with a specific market interest in China, Russia, or South Korea, putting some effort into learning about the top search engines in those countries is also a good strategy. And/or, you may want to consider putting some advertising budget into pay-per-click search ads on those platforms.
Finally, I want to stress the importance of YouTube and Pinterest as potential traffic drivers.
These two lesser known search engines represent a wealth of untapped opportunity for hotels! Use the content you’re creating for your hotel blog or social media platforms — repurpose it into video and Pinterest pins.
Did you know there were so many Google alternatives out there? Are YouTube and Pinterest part of your hotel SEO strategy? Let me know in the comments below!