New research from eMarketer shows that by the end of 2008, Russia will be the second largest internet market in Europe. It’s predicted that 40.3 million Russians will be online, representing nearly 30 percent penetration.

Russia’s GDP has seen a massive 368 percent growth since 2003 to reach £1.3 trillion this year. And Russia’s e-commerce has grown right along with it. Between 2006 and 2007 alone, there was a 30 percent growth in Russia’s online spend. In 2007, Russians spent £5.16 billion online. Nearly half of this spend was in online retail.

Russians also spend quite a bit of time online. A February 2008 study from comScore showed Russians logging on for an average of 13 days, at 82 minutes per day, and reading 2,322 pages of content during the month.

According to eMarketer, the massive popularity of social networking in the country has been a big contributing factor in Russia’s internet growth. The most popular social networking site in the country is (…not Facebook…) Vkontakte.ru.

Cyrillic is Idyllic

Looking ahead to 2009, Russians will be able to create their first internet addresses using their native Cyrillic script in lieu of Latin letters. This is in light of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ decision to greatly expand top-level-domains, which comes into effect early next year. Russians will then be able to surf the web entirely in Russian, which eMarketer predicts will further increase the number of internet users in Russia.

This is good news, since Russians prefer to search the web in Russian. Greig Holbrook, MD of www.obanmultilingual.com, explains that if marketers are looking to reach Russia’s vast market, their website should have Cyrillic content that has been optimised with keywords unique to Russian culture.

Greig explains that the keywords cannot be directly translated from English, since they are often a mix of English and Russian. “Russian searchers do prefer to search in Cyrillic,” says Greig, “but they often write the phrase phonetically based on English phrases. An example would be the term ‘business travel’. We’ve found that many Russians search for this term in Cyrillic while using the English phonemes.”

The YandeX Factor

While most people assume that Google has conquered the world, a native Russian search engine dominates in Russia. Yandex remains the top search portal in Russia, having handled nearly half of all Russian searches in February 2008.

A profile of Yandex by BusinessWeek detailed the reasons for the Moscow-based company’s stronghold in Russia over Google, Rambler Media and Mail.ru. Its primary advantage, reported the magazine, stems from its ability to cater to its users in the local language.

Yandex is able to index and search documents in the major Cyrillic languages: Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. From 1997 to 2007, the size of the Russian language portion of the Internet grew from a mere four gigabytes to about 28,000 gigabytes, making the job of indexing these prolific languages much bigger than it used to be.

The search engine recently launched its geo-targeting model, allowing advertisers to not only target countries and cities, but also to target within cities. Yandex is continually developing its search engine marketing offering and products, which means better choices for companies and marketers alike.

Having started its life as a blog search engine, Yandex still gives preferences to blogs over standard websites. Greig therefore suggests that, “companies wishing to target Russia may want to consider setting up a locally hosted blog and/or a stand alone website.”

As the pay-per-click costs on Yandex tend to be much higher than on other engines, search engine optimisation offers a better chance of return on investment over the long term.

Yandex is so strong that comScore recently named it the number two search outfit in Europe.

So for those marketers out there not yet zeroing in on the Russian e-market, now is the time. And best to do it with their cultural preferences in mind – because the Russian bear bends to no marketer.

About Oban Multilingual

Oban Multilingual is an expert in multilingual SEO and international SEM. With offices in over 26 countries worldwide, the company is unique in being able to offer expert localised search strategies for a number of multinational companies. For more information visit: http://www.obanmultilingual.com/