It is understandable that most enterprises will give priority to search through Google when formulating and implementing natural search engine optimization strategies.
As of March 2023, Google had a 93.37% share of the desktop search market in the UK. This means that, for many people, being found online means being found on Google. Therefore, it is difficult to consider optimizing corporate websites for other search engines.
But for sustainable companies looking to connect with like-minded customers, it may also be worth optimizing your site for Ecosia, an ecologically conscious search engine popular with ethical searchers.
In this article, we will share with you some experiences in optimizing Ecosia search and provide some suggestions to help you start with your own website.
What is an Ecosia search engine?
Ecosia is probably the most famous sustainable search engine. Founded in 2009 to help deal with the worsening climate crisis, Ecosia is a certified B-Corp and non-profit organization that puts good ethics first, promotes afforestation, promotes digital privacy, and operates as a negative carbon dioxide emissions organization.
For people who care about the environment, Ecosia is another good search engine besides Google.
It is famous for its tree-planting activities, using advertising revenue to fund afforestation programs and sustainable development projects around the world. It believes that afforestation is a solution to global climate problems and local ecological destruction, and supports organizations committed to solving the problem.
Some statistics of ecosia
- Monthly active users exceed 20 million
- 173 million trees have been planted in more than 13000 sites
- About one tree can be planted every 45 searches.
Why optimize your website for Ecosia?
Given Ecosia’s relatively small share of the search engine market, you may wonder if it’s worth the time and effort to optimize your site for Ecosia.
However, as a company that develops related products and services based on WordPress, we believe that the purpose of search engine optimization should be to find the right audience, not just to attract more audiences. Ethical and ecologically conscious enterprises can benefit a lot from Ecosia optimization.
Although the market share is much smaller (0.23%), it is still worth considering:
- Climate-conscious people may choose to use Ecosia instead of Google
- Searchers who attach importance to online privacy may give priority to using Ecosia
- Because fewer companies optimize for less-used search engines, there will be less competition on Ecosia, and your site may rank higher in search results
In addition, we find from the website statistics that more and more people are using Ecosia, although there is still a big gap with Google, Baidu and Bing. From the data screenshot below, we can see that in the last 30 days, Ecosia has jumped to the tenth place in terms of the source of external chain traffic.
External link traffic statistics in the last 30 days
How to optimize your website for Ecosia
Ecosia uses Microsoft Bing’s search engine infrastructure, so to help your site achieve higher rankings on Ecosia, you actually need to optimize your site for Bing.
It’s not just Ecosia. Other search engines that use Bing’s infrastructure include Yahoo and privacy-conscious DuckDuckGo, which, together with Bing itself, account for 6.2 per cent of the UK market, equivalent to many people.
When optimizing a website for Ecosia, it’s important to know that there are some differences between Bing’s search algorithm and Google’s, which can lead to very different results when searching for a particular word.
The following key considerations should be taken into account when optimizing a website for Ecosia:
- Bing is not as good at using synonyms as Google is, but prefers to use specific key phrases. For example, a search for “eco-friendly household products Manchester” on Bing will find eco-friendly household goods companies that ship to Manchester, while Google will find stores that sell replenishment of cleaning products.
- Including your specific key phrases in the meta description will help improve your ranking
- Focus on getting inbound links from respected sources
- Posting content on social media and encouraging your followers to share it can help your site achieve higher rankings on Ecosia
- Optimize your site content for location-based search
- Ecosia offers both Bing and Google Maps, so brick-and-mortar companies can benefit from registering a pushpin on both platforms.
Use the BING webmaster tool
If you have done natural search engine optimization for your site before, you may already be familiar with the Google search console. Happily, the Bing webmaster tool is very similar in layout and functionality, so optimizing for Ecosia should be easy to use.
If you have used Google Search Console before, you will be familiar with the Bing webmaster tool.
The Bing webmaster tool allows you to:
- Manually submit page updates to the Bing index
- Register a sitemap to help search for spiders to find your web page
- View your currently displayed search terms and estimated location (but this is only related to the search on Bing, not to Ecosia)
- View a list of sites that have backlinks to your site
- Block and delete web pages from Bing index
- Perform a website scan to check for any problems that may affect the rankings
IndexNow
IndexNow is a tool that runs as a WordPress plug-in that automatically pushes any page update to Bing’s search index.
This means that whenever you update a product, post a new blog post, or otherwise change the content, Bing automatically adds it to the index so that the search engine always has the latest version. This means that you no longer need to manually submit the page index.
Warm Tip: it is recommended to use our search push plug-in instead of IndexNow, while supporting Google, Baidu, Bing multiple search engine push.
Why can’t my website be displayed on Bing?
When we optimized the site for Ecosia, we found it quite a challenge to get your site to appear on the Bing index.
At first we found that, with the exception of the home page, most pages were found but not crawled, and the Bing webmaster tool stated: “the checked URL is what Bing knows:
At first we found that, with the exception of the home page, most pages were found but not crawled, Bing webmaster tool states:
The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation.
Bing is aware of the URL being checked, but there are some problems with the URL that interfere with the index. We recommend that you follow the Bing webmaster’s guide to increase your chances of being indexed. )
This is not particularly useful. When we searched this error message to find a solution, we found other frustrated users who had been jailed by Bing.
After some investigation and adjustment, we found that the following points help us to enter the Bing index:
- Submit a site map to the Bing search console
- Scan the website in the Bing search console and handle any obvious warnings
- Make sure all pictures have alt alternative text
- Make sure that all pages have meta descriptions set up
- Automatically submit updates to Bing using the IndexNow tool
- Get at least one inbound link from another website
- Crawling optimization settings using the Yoast SEO plug-in also help new pages to be indexed
- If all else fails, ask Bing support for help
It should be noted that updated pages can take up to 2-3 weeks to appear in Bing’s index (and your site appears in Ecosia search results), so be prepared to wait. Still, SEO is always a long game, isn’t it?
More search engine optimization techniques
At Root, we know that the greenest websites are those that are not displayed at all. We also know that in a digital-first world, this is not realistic for businesses, so the next best thing to do is to make sure your site is displayed only when it is really useful for people who search for specific phrases.
Here are several ways to ensure that you connect with the right audience, not just with a larger audience.
- Subdivide. Although there are fewer searches for specific phrases, people who use these phrases are more likely to know what they want. Think about the difference between “the eco-shop near me” and “the zero-abandoned store in Stockport”. In addition, when you have more specific “long tail” keywords in your search results, this can improve the authority of your overall domain name and provide more credibility for your shorter “header” keywords.
- Page title and meta description. Optimize the page title and meta-description and write it clearly and descriptively, which will help your relevant pages to be displayed under specific search conditions.
- Think like a searcher. Optimizing keywords and phrases is not necessarily relevant to you or your business, and you need to consider the words that your audience may use when searching.
- Increase the page speed. Search engines like sites that load fast, and so do your customers and the planet. Minimizing the use of things that are known to slow down the site-such as video embedding, tracking scripts, and a large number of images-will help you achieve higher rankings on Ecosia, while improving the customer experience and more in line with your ethics.
Summary
Google’s power is everywhere to get attention online. However, for companies with climate awareness and ethics and want to do good things in the world, we think it is worthwhile to optimize your website on Ecosia.
By investing some time and effort on Ecosia, your business can help combat climate and ecological damage while ensuring that you are seen by the right audience, not just by more audiences. We hope this article will show you how to do this.
- Although Ecosia has a smaller user base than Google, it still has a large number of (more than 20 million) monthly users
- Ecosia is the first choice for ecologically conscious web users-this is the type of population that ethical and sustainable companies want to reach
- Optimizing your site for Ecosia is good for searchers, businesses, and the planet
- Optimizing for Ecosia will also help you display higher rankings on Bing, Yahoo, and privacy-conscious DuckDuckGo. Although it takes time and patience to be selected in the Bing index, this patience can be rewarded by more targeted (more qualified) site visitors.
- There are a lot of simple things you can do today to help you show it on Ecosia.
