Microsoft’s Bing will soon be powering the search results behind Yahoo – a move that is expected to give Bing roughly 23% of the search market. As an SEO professional you are probably wondering what this means for the SEO marketplace and how it will affect both you and your clients. The good news is that those of you that practice standard SEO techniques should be fine. The rest of you… well, you might want to read on.
The most immediate impact of the Bing/Yahoo announcement on July 29th is that the playing field for search engines just got a lot smaller. We will now be left with two major players in the marketplace: Google (the leader) and Yahoo/Bing (the up and coming). The other search engines, while out there, really don’t show up on the radar screen at this point. So is this a big deal? It really is, and it does mean that content is going to reign supreme for a long time to come. When you only have two major players in the marketplace, you really have only one way to differentiate yourself from the other 1 billion+ web sites in your niche – content.
Of course, SEO professionals were already aware that content was an important part of any search engine placement strategy. So this one won’t come as a surprise to many – just a gentle reminder to keep the content relevant and fresh.
The bigger concern is of course what happens over the long haul. Right now most of us apply techniques that favor Google, which makes sense since they hold 60% plus of the market. However the newly combined Bing/Yahoo represents an opportunity to start exploring this up and coming ‘niche’ if you will. After all, 20% of the market is pretty big. You might not be #1 on Google, but what if you could get to be #1 on Bing. That’s a lot of clicks!
It’s no secret that Bing has been getting good press as well – even the critics seem to like it. It could be possible that Bing starts being a real challenge to Google. If it continues to erode market share from them then more and more of your clicks could be arriving from Bing. SEM strategies that worked with Google may not work as well with Bing – after all, every search engine is different.
So what can you do to prepare for the Bing/Yahoo merger and prepare for the “what might be” of the future? Simple – keep practicing good SEO strategies.
As long as you practice the tried and true techniques many of you won’t have anything to worry about. It wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and join Bing’s webmaster program just so you know what is going on – but for the most part, its business as usual.
Nothing is as certain as change – and someday instead of telling people to “Go Google It” we may saying “Just Bing It!”
Tue, Aug 4, 2009
Business Tactics