What you should know about search engine Yandex

When you want your online store to succeed in Russia, you surely want it to be shown in search engine results pages. You ought to think Google is your search engine of choice, but when it’s about the Russian market, think again. It’s Yandex that’s the dominant search engine in this country. Check the infographic to see what Yandex can offer you!

The infographic was offered to us by Search Laboratory. This British search agency has teamed up with Yandex to help British fashion retailers sell online in Russia. And we understand very well why fashion retailers would like to sell online in this country, as it has the most internet users in Europe. And it’s not difficult to come up with a reason why Search Laboraty is working with Yandex. Because it’s the world’s third largest search engine and accounts for more than 60 percent of all online queries in Russia.

According to recent data 36% of Russians buy from foreign online retailers, with the United Kingdom accounting for 21 percent of these purchases. So yeah, we get it why European online retailers would like to sell in Russia. But you can’t just lift your optimization strategy you use for Google and attempt to implement it on Yandex. That doesn’t work. Yandex has its own rules and preferences.

For example, Yandex likes websites with Russian domains and that has fully localised copy throughout the site. It also favors websites with a Russian landline number and local office address. Yandex doesn’t like over-optimised websites, paid links or machine translations. So beware of these things and you might find yourself ranking high in Yandex one day…