Bing is capturing a larger segment of the search engine market, as more consumers search using mobile devices with Microsoft’s search engine set as a default. Google still holds 66.9 percent of the market, according to ComScore, but Bing reached its highest level yet in October, capturing 18.1 percent market share. Yahoo’s share shrunk to 11 percent, with Ask and AOL making up the remaining share.
What does this mean for your business? As the number of consumers searching the internet using Bing increases, you’ll eventually have no choice but to pay attention to the search engine.
If one in five internet users heads to Bing to find a plumber or restaurant or birthday present for a family member, one in five internet users may never realize your business exists. When that number reaches one-fourth or one-third of all internet traffic, you may begin to feel it in your sales numbers.
Google vs. Bing: Similarities
Quality content is important for ranking well on both sites, as both Google and Microsoft know the importance of ensuring searchers have access to relevant, well-crafted content. Simply plugging in keywords a certain number of times no longer works for either site. It’s important to provide information of value to anyone who would be searching for information on a particular topic.
Top brands rank higher on both sites, providing a challenge to local businesses trying to compete with national franchises. Searchmetrics added, however, that Google’s search engine algorithms seem to more easily be able to distinguish between big-name brands and brands that aren’t as well known.
Google vs. Bing: Differences
As Searchmetrics recently noted, results are often vastly different across both platforms, with only 24.7 percent of the URLs that show up on either site matching the other. Backlinks are more effective at attracting traffic on Bing than Google, perhaps because Google has been stricter about filtering out such behaviors in recent years. Social signals are also closely linked to Bing search results, with likes on Google Plus being especially important.
Google is more likely to be concerned with a site’s Canonical URL than Bing. However, Google has evolved over the years to catalog the entire content of a site, rather than the first 100K or so that Bing is able to see. To cover both search engines, SEO marketers should strive to put the most important content toward the top of the page, rather than scattering it throughout.
On-page ranking factors are more important than ever for search engine ranking, no matter which search engine is spidering the page. The topic of the page should be made clear in as many places as possible, with title tags stating the purpose of the site, as well.
As businesses continue to monitor the changing landscape of search engine marketing, more changes are likely to come up over the years. Businesses can’t go wrong by providing high-quality, relevant content that is formatted for maximum search engine results. With Google still maintaining such a stronghold on the market, however, businesses will likely find meeting Google search engine criteria is top priority, with Bing coming in a distant second.
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