Should I Optimise for Bing Searches
It’s safe
to say that Google is the worlds favourite search engine, breaking it down into the UK and the United States they have gained a large monopoly in the search market. With computer giant Microsoft and their development of Bing evolved from Windows Live Search and MSN search in 2009 and a slow, but steady increase in market share, should SEO’s and businesses start looking toward this emerging brand?
In January according Google gained a whooping 67% of the search market, with Bing at a 16.5% share in the United State, for the US this is a pretty high figure to ignore for marketers – a missed opportunity and source of potential customers.
With reference to the UK market, according to a Experian Hitwise specialising in monitoring search traffic, Google have dipped to their lowest share of 90% and Bing at a 5% high maybe it’s time to get a strategy in place.
Breaking Down the Stats
Start taking a closer look at your websites analytics to see the impact of this, I’ll be using a few examples to see the differences between certain industries, I’ll take a home improvement supplier as an example. With 3000 Bing over a 120,000 Google organic search visits this breaks down to be a little under the average. With a 4% e-Commerce conversion rate has generated this particular client £15000 of extra revenue.
Looking at a client specialising in providing activity days throughout the UK, Bing has only generated 38 visits from 2000 Google searches, which is just a small fraction of the average statistic, this figure is to some degree nothing worth investing in an average local service provider.
With Microsoft pushing their Bing brand hard and attaching their search engine to their own products such as using Bing as a pre-installed default browser such as the Xbox 360, Windows Operating system and Internet Explorer, whilst being attached to Facebook’s search feature Microsoft are slowly moving this percentage up.
The Bigger Picture
If your average Google search traffic per month is between 100-500 visits I’d suggest to businesses that Bing can be forgotten about for at least 2013, but for the larger websites, eCommerce sites and campaigns as the example above the figures can multiply to be equal a relatively steady stream of income, this figure was generated with little regard for Bing’s guidelines or without any orientated optimisation.
Please look forward to future posts investigating further into this potential serious competition to Google and what techniques are used to enhance your searches for Bing Search engines.
