bing

Submit Your Business to Bing Local Search

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Have all of you business owners out there noticed the buzz about Bing Local? Have you even tried it? If so, did your business appear in the search results?

The SEO experts want to debate whether Bing Local will ever surpass Google’s local search. Probably not. It would take an astronomical shift in search behavior. But that’s not to say that Bing Local doesn’t have some cool features that your customers might find appealing.

Regardless of whether or not you think it will ever become #1, there’s a quick SEO task that all business owners should be doing – submitting their sites to Bing Local.

It’s easy to do (takes less than 15 minutes) and it’s FREE. Basically, there’s no reason not to do it.

Here are the steps you’ll need to go through to get listed:

  1. Go to Bing Local’s Listing Center.
  2. Make sure you don’t already have a listing.
  3. Setup a Windows ID (If you don’t already have one)
  4. Enter your business info (description, tagline, specialties) as wells as contact info.
  5. Select as many as 6 categories in which you want your website listed (this is great for being associated with your top keywords). [SEE SCREENSHOT BELOW]
  6. Provide details about specific features of your business.
  7. Verify your location on a map.
  8. Submit

bingcategoriesWhether you know a lot about search engine optimization or not, this is a very simple process. When you weigh the potential of Bing Local, you can’t afford to ignore the possibility to gain additional qualified traffic.

Be sure to set a side a little time and get your business listed in Bing Local right away.

Bing Grabs Market Share. SEO Beware?

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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.