Are you planning to expand your business and offer goods and services on the Russian market? Then its time to think about Yandex SEO. Yandex is a very large and popular Russian search engine with more than 43.92% of market share (for the last 12 months), the biggest part goes to Google. So, it’s simply unforgivable to miss such an opportunity if you want to build your brand awareness worldwide.
The number of online purchases is constantly growing in the Russian segment, so even companies that offer very specific services or goods can easily find a target audience. Plus, usage of Yandex is not limited to the Russian Federation only, this Russian search engine is used by many people in CIS countries, which also can bring additional benefits to your business.
Yandex SEO: how to start?
If you’re planning to reach the highest possible positions on Google your website must meet search engine requirements, the same works for Yandex. How to succeed in Russian search? We will try to highlight the most important steps in this short guide.
1. Before diving deep into international SEO and making the final decision, what benefits you will have from it, it’s better to start from the most obvious things - check the interest to services and goods you offer using Yandex Wordstat platform. This tool is similar to Google Keyword Planner and shows the numbers, dynamics, and changes related to certain key phrases. This should be a good start for your Yandex SEO campaign. Don’t forget about synonyms, different variations, keyword endings, correct keyword spelling.
2. Once you’re done with the 1st step, finished with keyword research you can go ahead with creation of Russian copy for your existing website and do SEO optimization in accordance with the best Yandex SEO guidelines. The level of English in Russian speaking countries is not so high. If you want to target a wide range of customers its better to talk their language.
3. Yandex SEO is about unique and relevant content. At least the Russian search engine claims that. So please make sure your text copy provides useful information to website visitors. The time of spam texts with a huge batch of key phrases, absolutely meaningless and written not for people but for bots, finally gone. Again feel free to use Yandex Wordstat to collect ideas for new blog posts or add some relevant phrases to product descriptions.
4. The next step is to set up Yandex Webmaster to let the biggest Russian search engine know about the existence of your website. How to do this and verify your website you can read here.
5. Yandex has great feature, called Original text. The idea is the following, if you create unique content on your own and not just copy it from other sources, before you submit an article for indexing purposes to Yandex you can send it as Original text to protect it from plagiarism. It doesn’t mean that people will not not be able to copy your piece of content, but you give a signal to Yandex that you’re this content/idea firstly appeared on your site.
6. Backlinks. Even though Yandex tells that backlinks are now not one of the important ranking factors, the amount of services to increase Yandex SQI by offering high-quality backlinks is enormous.
7. Turbo pages - really cool Yandex technology that makes your pages really fast and light, which will allow you to compete the market. It really helps especially for those users whose internet connection is really slow. They have plugin for WordPress, so it doesn’t require assistance from a developer's side or other specialists, so you can set up this technology within several minutes.
8. Yandex greatly updated their instruments and offer more opportunities to webmasters. Can’t mention here Yandex Metrica. Earlier it was a rather simple web visor tool, highlighted with color dots all users interactions with your content. Now it presented as screen video, so you can check and analyze how website visitors interact with your platform, what are the issues they might have and you missed and how you can improve UX.
9. Finally, we came up to one of the most important Yandex ranking criteria - users’ behavior. What does it mean for you as a website owner? If a visitor didn’t find the information he was looking for at your website and continued checking other websites for additional information, it will be a sign to Yandex that you don’t work enough on your website and don’t deserve to have high ranking positions. How users’ behavior influences rankings in Yandex, read in our case study.
If you need professional assistance with Yandex SEO from native Russian-speakers, feel free to contact us today.