Bing Grabs Market Share. SEO Beware?

Bing is here. Are you using it? The numbers show that people are at least trying it. comScore says that it’s gaining market share.

Bottom line: it’s early. But it does raise som interesting possibilities for those of us in SEO.

Chances are people are hearing about Bing or seeing their multitude of ads and are giving it a try. Do the early results mean that Google needs to start worrying? They may lose some market share, but it’s hard to imagine Bing becoming the most used search engine.

If Bing adoption does take off, this would obviously mean a change in the search engine optimization and search engine marketing business. At that point, instead of companies obsessing about how their website perform on Google, they’ll also want to increase their exposure on another search engine.

From my experience with Brand5, demanding outstanding organic performance would be a new phenomenon. An overwhelming amount of business owners that come to us for SEO services are concerned about their performance on Google (and I can’t say I blame them, at least for organic search results). Our services are proven to help how their website ranks on all major search engines (both paid and organic), but ultimately it’s how their site ranks on Google that makes them feel like they are getting good ROI on their search engine optimization spend.

Bing is probably a long way from changing the way the average business owner views the importance of anything other than Google. But if the growth trends continue, look for Bing search engine optimization to become more popular amongst search engine optimization companies.

8 thoughts on “Bing Grabs Market Share. SEO Beware?”

  1. Mark,

    I made a small effort to get my website well listed on Google and I ended up being better ranked on Yahoo and Bing with no direct effort on my part. A simple search for Camdenton Wed Design should return camdentonwebdesign.com or tonkapark.com first on the list, in my opinion. Bing and Yahoo both give Tonka Park the first listing. Each engine returns a different url though. Google on the other hand gives me a bunch of directory pages and other sites listing every city in the country with web design on the first page of results.

    Lately I have been using Yahoo and Bing for my searching just to see if I get better results.

    I will have to read through the rest of your suggestions to make sure I am on track.


    Matt Anderson
    http://tonkapark.com

    Reply
    • Matt-

      A search just now produced you as #2 on Google, so you’re doing well for that keyword on all of the engines.

      A couple of quick things to do are submitting your site to Google local and to the ODP (DMOZ.org).

      Let me know how else I can help.

      Reply
  2. Mark,

    I made a small effort to get my website well listed on Google and I ended up being better ranked on Yahoo and Bing with no direct effort on my part. A simple search for Camdenton Wed Design should return camdentonwebdesign.com or tonkapark.com first on the list, in my opinion. Bing and Yahoo both give Tonka Park the first listing. Each engine returns a different url though. Google on the other hand gives me a bunch of directory pages and other sites listing every city in the country with web design on the first page of results.

    Lately I have been using Yahoo and Bing for my searching just to see if I get better results.

    I will have to read through the rest of your suggestions to make sure I am on track.


    Matt Anderson
    http://tonkapark.com

    Reply
    • Matt-

      A search just now produced you as #2 on Google, so you’re doing well for that keyword on all of the engines.

      A couple of quick things to do are submitting your site to Google local and to the ODP (DMOZ.org).

      Let me know how else I can help.

      Reply
  3. Don’t forget that most new computers have Bing set as the default search engine in Internet Explorer. Windows is not stupid and they are trying to gain market share by making it harder for users to get to Google. My wife even uses Bing now, when asked why, she says it is just easier than opening up Google to do a search + she doesn’t know how to change the default search engine in IE, it’s not like you just select Google, instead, you have to go looking for it to add to the list and then set it as a default in another step. I believe that us SEO guys are going to make sure we optimize for Bing in the future just as hard as we used to for Google in the past. Bing seems more fallible to keword stuffing as a process.

    Reply
  4. Don’t forget that most new computers have Bing set as the default search engine in Internet Explorer. Windows is not stupid and they are trying to gain market share by making it harder for users to get to Google. My wife even uses Bing now, when asked why, she says it is just easier than opening up Google to do a search + she doesn’t know how to change the default search engine in IE, it’s not like you just select Google, instead, you have to go looking for it to add to the list and then set it as a default in another step. I believe that us SEO guys are going to make sure we optimize for Bing in the future just as hard as we used to for Google in the past. Bing seems more fallible to keword stuffing as a process.

    Reply
    • Good points.

      What can’t be argued is this is MSFT’s best attempt in search to date. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months.

      Reply

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