Get a Piece of Bing’s New Market Share

Over the past month several of our customers have been interested in how Microsoft’s advertising push for Bing has affected their site traffic. Overall, there have been more Bing searches, but this doesn’t mean that overall search engine volume has gone up. This is because Bing is siphoning market share from its rival Yahoo, but it is not necessarily adding to search volume. This is because search engine use is demand driven, so people have to have something in mind before they make a query. Bing has made itself newsworthy through an advertising push that even includes buying Pay-Per-Click on Google for the term "search engine" and recent media reports indicate that its initiatives are succeeding.

How can the average ecommerce company profit from this news? If you haven’t established natural search engine positions on Bing (which are somewhat volatile on a week-to-week basis) then you can take advantage of the relatively low cost of pay-per-click advertising on MSN Adcenter.

Over the past few years, online stores with limited budget have put most or all of their dollars into the Google Adwords program. By expanding out into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter, which places paid ads on Bing, there is an opportunity to get a foothold on search traffic that similar sized competitors may have neglected. There are even some very large companies who aren’t buying Yahoo and MSN ads, so small and medium B2B and B2C enterprises can get good conversions for a comparatively lower cost. Overall, Web.com Search Agency customers experience a higher conversion rate on Yahoo and MSN PPC platforms, due to a variety of demographic factors.

As a recent CNN report shows, Google dominated 65% of the search engine market for June 2009. However, this means that 35% of search engine traffic was being served through other channels. Bing and Yahoo comprised a combined 28% of online searches in the US, which is still a huge opportunity for big and small businesses. (Bing had 8.4% and Yahoo had 19.6%) Considering that competitive terms may get millions of searches every month, a presence on these engines makes economic sense. Even if you are going after terms that only get a few thousand searches a month, missing 35% of them could be the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy. There are some nuances to each platform that take time to learn, but any qualified search engine marketing agency should have no problem setting up a campaign for all major search engines.

SEO for Bing – Optimizing for Microsoft's New Search Engine

Many of our customers are curious about SEO (search engine optimization) for the Bing "decision" engine. The short answer is that if you were found on MSN Live Search, you are likely to have the same positions on Bing. This is because Bing’s search results are nearly identical to their previous incarnations on Live Search, but Bing’s interface and functionality have been upgraded to present people with more choices in the “related search” menu at the left of the page, and also shows you previous searches in the same area. The related search feature is the "decision engine" factor, but overall you still need to show up near the top of the list of results if you want to get found.

Over the past few weeks, one of the differences for our customers involved an increase in traffic compared to previous MSN Live Search data, which was noted once Google updated its Analytics to track Bing as a search engine. The traffic increase is likely due to the fact that Bing has quickly taken a bigger market share over Yahoo search, probably because Microsoft is spending a few hundred million dollars on advertisements. How long Bing keeps its share of the marketplace is anyone’s guess, but overall people seem to be having a positive search experience.

One of the problems with Bing and its predecessor Live Search has to do with the volatility seen in search results. Web.com Search Agency tracks results for several clients, and their competitors, and MSN’s volatility has been noticeable for multiple sites, not all of which are even using SEO practices. Keywords will move several spaces up or down, even from week to week, with a churn rate that almost always exceeds Google or Yahoo search results. Combined with the fact that MSN was always the #3 search engine, there was little interest in optimizing MSN over Google, or even Yahoo for that matter. One of the differences between Bing and other engines is that its algorith is not necessarily as dependant on link popularity, so on page factors are more paramount.

For people who want to be found in Bing, several of the old MSN Search rules apply. First, you need to cached by Bing, which is done by submitting your site. MSNbot is still the crawler that will visit your website, so make sure you aren’t excluding it in your robots.txt file. MSN also has a Webmaster Center, which is not as famous as Google’s, but still highly recommended if Bing is important to you or your clients.

Second, you want to make sure your site has fresh content. What is fresh content? Essentially, updates to pages, added functionality, and more information about products or services will give you a boost. One way to keep content fresh involves updating a blog regularly, or referencing new press releases from your homepage. You should also be doing periodic keyword research to see if there are any new phrases that are worth going after, and then build fresh content around those keywords. Many sources on the internet report that MSN’s algorithm is more keyword oriented, but you should still keep in line with rules that Yahoo and Google use to prevent keyword stuffing.

Third, ensure that your metatags are descriptive and reference your major keywords, since the general SEO consensus is that Bing and its predecessor use these as part of their indexing. As always, try to avoid keyword stuffing and keep in mind that you don’t want to go too deep into any gray areas, because Bing may also be spending more dollars on algorithm improvement in the future, which will help it to filter out lower quality sites. One potential advantage you may have with Bing is that you can look at the “related search” menu and see if you have any relevant topics that you can build into your own site. Assuming that people who search for general topics will follow this menu, you have a chance to sharpen your relevance in one or more of these fields. If Bing retains its position over Yahoo or takes a greater market share, you will have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Another topic of note is that Bing, like Google, has a certain preference for exact match domain names, but it also will list .tv and .cc domains among its results, which is less common for Google. Therefore, a truly competitive or low volume/high margin term from one of these extensions may be profitable.

As a rule, a site that is good for Google will fall into line with Yahoo and MSN, but new content appears to get a better boost, at least for awhile. New sites almost always show up first in MSN/Bing, which may create a credibility gap because there are a lot of new sites that aren’t good resources for their topic matter. For people who try out different search engines, the quickest correct answer is going to be the determining factor in market share longevity. Any improvement to the search experience is going to keep internet users coming back, which means that search engines are always going to be looking for the best possible resource related to the topic typed into the search box. Aside from all the talk about semantic matching, link-based algorithms, and domain trust, the main takeaway for anyone interested in optimizing for Bing (or any other engine) is that creating a useful, readable site is the first step to SEO success.

Update (7/15/09) : CNN posted an article that breaks down some of the differences in Google Search vs. Bing which also incorporates observations on market share and upcoming software platforms.