In recent weeks, there has been a lot of hype about Bing.
I have to admit at first I was not excited about Bing. At a glance it appeared to be yet another attempt to design a search engine that grabs more of the market from namely Google and Yahoo!. With Microsoft’s $100 million advertising budget it we noticed that Bing was getting a fair amount more attention then previous versions to the point that clients were actually contacting us to make sure their sites are ‘optimized for Bing’.
In the first few weeks I was committed to doing the basics on bing, the obligatory checking our site on Bing, watching market share. I really drug my feet on this. I was sure this was a trend that would not stay around.
The main reason I was not exited was we have no idea if the market for Bing will continue to grow. Until it does I cannot see a scenario where tailoring and optimizing a site for Bing would be worthwhile when we can get more impact and ROI with established tested techniques.
Second, my experience and indeed most people’s experience with MSN’s past dabbling in search engines; has been frustrating at best. I would need someone to show me the Bing has something that other search engines to not.
In contrast to my traditional views, Garrett Gillas, our on-site optimization expert, couldn’t be more thrilled with Bing. He is such an enthusiast, he started BingSEOguide.com and has ‘Bing Tones’ installed on his phone – what a nerd.
In response to my concerns I learn that Bing is already getting a tremendous amount of traffic, The metrics vary wildly but it looks like it holds a strong position at #3 with the top search players and has several events which are being talked about which could boost the market share even more.
1) Discussions of merging with Yahoo! The implications of this could be outstanding and really force us to take a look at how our search budget is divided.
2) Launch of Microsoft’s new operating system. Historically we have seen a boost in traffic when new operating systems are shipped and I am sure 2010 will be no exception.
3) Talk of launching new Microsoft Stores.
Garrett also reminded me that Bing was pioneering a feature that would give users an independent reason to use them, instead of just being good enough that users didn’t seek out a better replacement. That feature of course is real time search. We will talk about this in more detail, but basically the idea would be that Bing would integrate real time results from Twitter and news sites. This new search model could have a huge impact on publicizing information and in the way we approach search engine optimization.
In light of this information, what’s a search engine optimization company do?
Any good search engine optimization company will be following Bing closely, but at this point, we are not changing our established strategy to do special optimization for Bing.
Citations
1. Crum, Chris. “More Bing Numbers Than You Can Shake a Stick at,” WebProNews, June 13, 2009.
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