Everything You Should Know About DuckDuckGo SEO

DuckDuckGo. 

If you’re familiar with the vast and fascinating world of search engines and search engine optimization, chances are you’re already heard about DuckDuckGo. However, if you haven’t or you don’t truly understand its significance, rest assured – for we have compiled everything you should know about DuckDuckGo SEO in this article! 

DuckDuckGo is growing in popularity, follow our SEO guide to boost your rankings and grow your traffic from this exciting upstart.

So, without further ado, let’s get started.

What is DuckDuckGo?

What if we told you that Google is not the hero we all treat it as? Here’s the thing: the things we search for on a search engine are usually self-evident, predictable, and easy to fetch with simple algorithms. This knowledge ceases to make sense that search engines like Google require privacy-invading trackers and systems that steal our data. 

Once you realize that your requirements are not as hard to satisfy as search engines make it seem like, you’ll understand that you don’t really need Google to begin with. 

But, if not Google, then what? 

Enter DuckDuckGo – the Google alternative that is slowly, swiftly, and surely moving us towards a post-Google reality, and that too without infringing our privacy!

It is only recently that people have gained the necessary awareness about privacy and how tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google make a joke. In light of countless antitrust claims against the corporations, people have really started realizing that these platforms have frail privacy policies that really don’t do you any good. 

This is where DuckDuckGo comes in and takes the cake. As a search engine, DuckDuckGo handles data that sets it apart from others of its kind. It claims that it never – yes, you heard that right, NEVER – stores your personal information or search history. And ultimately, that means that it doesn’t bombard you with ads and neither does it track your digital footprint across the Internet! 

So, essentially, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that claims to not indulge in shady, privacy-infringing practices such as tracking and ad targeting. It is here to search, and search is all it strictly does. 

Why Should You Care About DuckDuckGo?

This is where we get down to the juicy details on why you should bother with DuckDuckGo at all. For starters, because it’s safer. But let’s say you don’t care about that and are more interested in driving your website traffic. You’d think that you can only do that if you rank higher on prominent search engines like Google. Well, that’s just not true!

While DuckDuckGo’s market share in itself is definitely not up there with major engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, it can still prove to be lucrative for your business – especially in terms of driving traffic. 

DuckDuckGo states that the engine conducted nearly 24 billion searches in 2020, almost a 57% increase from 2019. Moreover, in December 2019, the daily average number of searches was about 48 million searches; in December 2020, this number was a whopping 79 million! This reflects steady growth and shows that DuckDuckGo is not here to play.

It has been proven that some if not all, websites are getting traffic at a considerably high growth rate from DuckDuckGo. A review of certain websites will show you that the percentage of organic traffic they get from DuckDuckGo, although small in number, has increased since 2019. This means that the engine is growing, and with it, the prospect of driving higher traffic is growing too!

A Few Facts About DuckDuckGo

Now that you know why you should care about DuckDuckGo, to begin with, let’s look at a few facts that will help you prepare yourself better for switching to this search engine.

According to DuckDuckGo, it gets its results from more than 400 sources, including crowdsourced websites and even its own crawler is known as the DuckDuckBot. Since privacy is the engine’s primary focus, it does not know the searcher’s location, and hence does not use it. As explained on the DuckDuckGo blog, this is how it works:

“When you hit the search button, your computer sends your search request to us. In that request, your computer embeds additional information. For example, if you opt-in to location sharing for a site, this information includes your approximate location. And even if you don’t, your request includes your IP address, and an approximate location can be inferred from it, though it isn’t always accurate.”

SEO With DuckDuckGo

We now have enough information about DuckDuckGo to understand why and how to rank higher on the search engine. Here are a few tips that will help you:

1. Get links from high-quality sites vs content farms or link networks
2. Use tools like Seed Keywords, SpyFu, SEMRush, and SE ranking to understand precisely how people are searching for your products.
3. Try optimizing for Bing (DuckDuckGo itself states that it is pulling from Bing). Hexometer is a great way to monitor your website for SEO issues and optimize your pages.
4. Claim and update your Apple maps listing since that is what GoGoDuck uses.
5. Stay in touch with the updates on GoGoDuck so that you know the reality of your situation!

Final Thoughts

DuckDuckGo is growing fast so we recommend getting on board now and make a place for yourself before your competitors do.

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