For years, the mantra of SEO has been “Google, Google Google,” with little to no mind paid to the other search engines.
Now, with Microsoft’s Bing controlling approximately one-quarter of the search market, that’s no longer the case – and publishers who ignore Bing are missing out on huge traffic and revenue opportunities.
Publishers who ignore Bing are missing out on huge traffic and revenue opportunities.
Key Findings
Among the stable of publishers who run Chitika, a staggering 47% are receiving less traffic from Bing and Yahoo than they should be. With a network-wide average of 23.58% of all search traffic coming from a Bing-powered search engine, that’s a lot of missed opportunity, opportunity now coming from a single source. On average, publishers who don’t optimize for Bing are missing out on a 9.4% bump in traffic.
“By combining forces, Bing and Yahoo have made it not only possible, but necessary to optimize for a powerful number 2 search engine,” says Chitika CTO Alden DoRosario. “Our publishers are very smart, but so many of them need to put some hard work into making sure Bing loves them as much as Google does.”
For example, one publisher who specializes in local content gets only 1.8% of their traffic from Bing and Yahoo combined. Simply by opening up their site to allow non-Google search engines to index all pages should result in an almost immediate 21% bump in traffic, with an even higher bump in revenues.
As observed in an earlier study, both Yahoo and Bing tend to drive traffic that is significantly more likely to click on ads.
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[…] two, it makes sense to devote resources to the Yahoo-Bing combination. Search ad network Chitika says that many of the publishers on its network — almost 50 percent — are receiving less […]
so that’s great, but then you provide no tips on how to optimize for bingahoo?
@rubadubtub Good point. The best place to start would be: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/
Also: Make sure you are not doing something crazy in robots.txt (like blocking the Bing Spider). We had one large publisher who had only Google allowed in his robots.txt — enabling Bing will probably yield him a couple hundred thousand dollars.
[…] Now that Bing controls approximately one quarter of the search market, it only makes sense that we think outside the Google = SEO mantra. The end result of ignoring this could be a loss of quite a bit of money […]
[…] Now that Bing controls approximately one quarter of the search market, it only makes sense that we think outside the Google = SEO mantra. The end result of ignoring this could be a loss of quite a bit of money […]
vary good website
thanks for ur post.
Besides ‘opening the gate’ for other search engines it seems like there are not other (search engine specific) ways to optimize your site for Bing/Yahoo or whatever else.
@sergey agree with you! @alden thanks for share the link 🙂
@Sergey – I’m not an SEO expert — but a quick search came up with links like this: http://lawfirmandattorney-internet-marketing.com/seo-for-bing/ .. There are probably other people who have done detailed analysis on how to optimize SEO for Bing.
The big point we are trying to make with this article is that Bing now owns about 24% of search referral marketshare and that number is likely going to grow. Its probably time to start optimizing for Bing (if you have not done so already). Also from previous studies, we know that Bing traffic converts much higher than Google. So by ignoring Bing, publishers could be leaving 30%+ of revenue on the table.
These are crazy numbers. I just checked and yahoo+bing is only bringing in 2.4% of my search traffic combined. Google is over 96%. Better find out how to fix that because optimizing for Bing should not harm the Google traffic at all.
Happily, our clients derive approx. 18% of their traffic from Bingahoo. And, overall conversion(s) is approx. 10% higher from such traffic.
@JadeDragon – when you say “crazy numbers”, I hope you mean in a good way 🙂 .. If you are getting only 2.4% from Bingahoo, you could be losing out on about 30% of your revenue.
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Nice information. Thanx for sharing.
You make a great point that Bing is increasing in importance. So what does a website need to do to capitalize on this opportunity?
From searching around on the web, here’s all I can find:
– Make sure your site is not blocking the Bing crawler (verify it in Bing Webmaster Tools)
That’s it! Pretty much everything that you do to optimize a site for Google applies to Bing too. I’m not sure you really have to change the way you are optimizing your website. If you search around a bit you might find that Bing favors older domain names, but what can you really do about that.
Anyway, if anyone has some practical suggestions on what it means to “optimize your site” for Bing, please add them to the comments; I’d love to hear them.
[…] Bing is an important component of a well-ordered, strategic campaign. In addition to incremental increases in traffic from Bing, e-commerce sites can expect a demographic that’s ready to shop: numbers released by […]
[…] Bing is an important component of a well-ordered, strategic campaign. In addition to incremental increases in traffic from Bing, e-commerce sites can expect a demographic that’s ready to shop: numbers released by […]
[…] engine player. In late 2010 Google controls 66-72% of the search engine market share (comScore vs Chitika) and in Canada an astounding 80% (SEO Consultants Directory). Many businesses use the 80/20 rule […]
Thanks for the information and to be honest it is not that easy to find these types of research news. And also everyone seems to be busy trying to figure out how to optimize for the big G and as a result it is really hard to find places where you can lean about Y + Bing optimizations. So if you guys can do another article on that it would not only benefit us but also will encourage the chitika publishers thus resulting a better revenue for the both parties. Anyway, thanks for the info… appreciate it 😀
If my site is already indexed with bing, then will i have to work further. Please advise
@anna – Making sure that its indexed by Bing is the most basic step – so good work if you are.
Across our network, for most well optimized publishers, we are seeing anywhere from 15-24% of search engine referrals coming from Bing+Yahoo. If you log into your Google Analytics and are seeing lower numbers, then you might have to work further [that’s where you consult an SEO friend or company – or try some online tools]
I do believe that you have a better chance of getting your site indexed better with bing and yahoo. If I am wrong then, I would welcome any comments.
You have a wonderful and very informative site
Whenever search engines, big shopping websites change their search or display algorithms they do not realize how much havoc they cause for small businesses. Small businesses need to realign their strategies all over again, facing the possibility that they may still lose traffic.
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