SEO for Bing

Everyone knows Google is the dominant SEO consideration but many aren’t aware of how important the Bing Yahoo Search Alliance is. Microsoft Bing is now powering all aspects of Yahoo’s search operations in the US and Canada.

In late 2010 Google controls 66-72% of the search engine market share and in Canada an astounding 80%.  Almost all businesses that do SEO or paid search marketing aggressively target Google.  However, with the Bing Yahoo Search Alliance completed,  Bing powered searches now account for a 24% US search engine market share - making this traffic source incredibly important for most websites.  It also makes Microsoft adCenter an important PPC player for the #2 search engine.

No SEO for Bing on 47% of websites

Many businesses optimize or market only on Google because in the past Yahoo and Bing each represented only small individual shares of the search engine market.  Chitika estimates that 47% of websites are not optimized for Bing despite Bing powered searches currently accounting for 24% of search engine traffic.

If you aren’t getting close t0 20% of your search engine traffic from Bing/Yahoo you might want to reevaluate your SEO strategy.  A great place to start is Bing Webmaster Toolbox.  Adam Audette also suggests some specific tactics for Bing in his Search Engine Watch expert post like focusing on XML sitemaps, using a centralized RSS page featuring relevant canonical URLs, and using the parameter handling tool in Bing Web Tools for URL normalization.

Bing users worth more

Not only are many businesses missing out on a substantial amount of traffic – they may be missing out on more valuable traffic.  An important thing to know about Bing users is that their traffic may be more e-commerce focused than Google.  Chitika research has shown that Bing users are 1.5 times more likely to click on your revenue-generating call-to-action than Google users.  A recent SearchIgnite report also showed that Bing powered ads for Yahoo searches showed increased clickthrough rates which indicates that the Bing algorithm is serving more relevant ads.  Good news for Microsoft adCenter users.

Bottom line: Show Bing some SEO love or you could be missing out on a substantial amount of traffic and revenue.

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