In case you aren’t familiar, Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees. They are a purpose-led company that uses their profits for tree-planting programmes around the world, and they have some impressive results to date - their website reporting 214,811,593 trees planted in 35+ countries. That’s no small impact stat. In this article we look into the differences in search and SEO on this platform. But first, some urbanism propoganda ♥
One quick search on Ecosia will have you realise the user experience of Ecosia is not quite up to scratch of it's equivelants. Sometimes you don't get the results you're looking for, sometimes you try a keyword variation, but sometimes you just end up going back to Google. This may leave you wondering whether it's even worth investigating. I would argue it is and that it won't actually require as much time as you may think. With Google Chrome now endorsing “Switch to Ecosia - it’s free” and an impact-driven mindset that is motivating them for continuous improvement, I believe the usability will improve and user base grow.
When you consider the type of people who are likely to be early adopters of a platform like this as well - those who are environmentally and socially conscious - you might realise they could be exactly your target audience. Even if there is only a few of them at the moment, they may be perfectly aligned. So, now that I’ve got your attention, you’ll be wondering how does it work, and do you need to do anything differently to optimise for Ecosia.
To answer this question we’ll need to know how it works. Ecosia pulls its results from search partners Microsoft Bing and Google. The results shown depend on the location of the searcher and the search providers available to them (at the time of writing this article results from Google are only offered in certain locations), plus the searcher’s own choice in regards to settings for which provider to use. They have some information about how it works here., saying Bing and Google SEO best practices still apply.
Beyond that though, it is a little unclear exactly how the results are ranked when pulled through into its own platform. This leaves a lot to be desired, because you'll quickly notice the results do not display the same as in Google. At this stage, it seems it's a game of trial and error. One thing that will make this easier is some data! So where can you get that?
Since Ecosia pulls results from both Microsoft Bing and Google, you’ll need data from both of these platforms. If you’re reading this article I’m assuming you’re already using Google Search Console, so then you’ll just need Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools works in a very similar way to other search tools. If you’ve used Search Console, you’ll be familiar with features like the Search Performance tab, Sitemaps and URL Inspection, etc.
At this stage, I don’t think it’s possible to know exactly which search queries are leading people to your site from Ecosia, however I believe you can make some informed guesses! I’m guessing that the recent referrals I have seen from Ecosia are being pulled from Bing because of the Keywords I’m seeing in Webmaster Tools - they relate to the pages viewed from referrals through Ecosia. This is much simpler to comprehend when looking at the data.
If you work for a B Corp, you might be interested to know your company will have a green leaf next to its listings in Ecosia. This is just another way they are making impact through search.
In addition to the green leaf endorsements for B Corps, they feature a whole suite of emoji-style tags to help you make choices about search results. For example, BP (British Petroleum) has a cute little black coal icon next to its name . Ecosia says search results with this icon highlight “climate destructive fossil fuel companies”.
So while the search experience in Ecosia is definitely lagging behind competitors at present, supported by the biggest names in the game - not to mention a groundswell of people-power - they look set to make some serious impact. Testing is needed to figure out how to rank well on this platform but being purpose-led is likely to help!
If you do decide to switch to Ecosia for free after reading this blog, you'll probably find yourself double-dipping search engines for a while until the experience catches up, a little annoying but totally brat.
