Search promotion for Russia

Search promotion for the Russian market: Yandex and Google, technical work, page structure, maps and directories. Slower than paid ads, but the traffic does not stop the day you stop paying.

Yandex or Google

In Russia the two split the market roughly in half, with Yandex ahead on mobile and on commercial queries. They are worked on together — the technical basics are the same — but the tools differ: Yandex Webmaster, Yandex Metrica and Yandex Business on one side, Search Console on the other. A site that only looks good in Google is leaving half the market on the table.

The technical part

• Speed and mobile layout. Both are ranking factors, and both are the cheapest things to fix.
• Indexing. Sitemap, robots.txt, canonical addresses, no duplicate pages competing with each other.
• Titles and descriptions. Unique for every page — this is what a person reads in the results before deciding to click.
• Structured data. Organisation, services, contacts and prices in a format search engines read directly.

Structure and pages

A page ranks for queries that it is actually about. If you sell five services, five pages are needed, not one page listing all five. Same for cities: a separate page per city only works when it has its own content, otherwise it is duplicate pages under different headings.

Regions — the part foreigners miss

Yandex assigns a site to a region, and results differ from city to city. One region per site, chosen in Yandex Webmaster. Getting this wrong is the single most common reason a perfectly good site ranks nowhere: it is competing in the wrong city. For companies working across the country, the region is set to Russia, and local visibility is built through business cards on maps instead.

Maps and directories

Yandex Business, Google Business Profile and 2GIS often bring enquiries earlier than the site itself, especially for services. A filled-in card with photos, working hours, services and replies to reviews costs nothing but attention, and it appears above organic results.

How long it takes

First movement in three to four months, stable results in six to twelve. Anyone promising the top of the results in a month is either selling brand queries you already own or spending your money on something that will be penalised later.

Reporting

Positions measured on a fixed list of queries, traffic from search, and enquiries from that traffic. The third number is the one that matters — positions are a means, not a result.

Cost

Quoted after I see the site, the niche and the competition in your region. A single landing page and a catalogue with a thousand items are not the same work, and pretending otherwise in a price list helps nobody.