Optimising for Bing?

When search marketers look for analytics, they usually go to sources like comScore or Experian Hitwise.  Both of these organizations put Google at the top of the search engine heap, with a market share that is more than twice that of Bing and Yahoo combined.  But recent market research from Rosetta finds that it may be well worth putting some more eggs in your Bing search engine basket.  Why should you consider optimizing for Bing?

Hitwise, comScore, and Rosetta arrive at their figures in different ways. The former two are usually fairly closely aligned, but Rosetta pulled data from over 10 million organic (Hitwise and comScore include paid search) search visits in the first five months of 2011 in order to measure the percentage contributed by Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and then further break the data down into vertical markets.

According to their report, “…although all industries and verticals can benefit from focusing on Google to increase their share of organic search engine traffic, marketers shouldn’t forget about Bing and Yahoo search results as a great source of leads or conversions.”

While Rosetta’s results agree with Hitwise and comScore that Google is dominate across the board, Yahoo and Bing gave the search giant stiff competition in some verticals.  In financial services, for instance, Google has about 54 percent of the market, and in retail, only 60 percent of the clicks came from Google.  According to Search Engine Watch, “Bing powered search on Yahoo represents a more significant organic SEO opportunity in the retail sector, with almost a 37% share.”  You can see the breakdown by industry in this chart.

What can you do to capitalize on Bing’s steady growth?

• Check out Microsoft’s AdCenter, in addition to Google’s AdWords.
• Make sure Bing can crawl your website.
• Check out Bing’s Webmaster Tools to take advantage of their tips, suggestions, and help.
• Optimise your anchor text.
• Make sure your content is tight and optimised properly (important for Bing, Yahoo, and Google).

Bing is continuing to show growth, and now is a great time to take a look at the search underdog (at the moment anyway).