According to Comscore’s calculations, Bing received 18.1% of all searches in the United States for the month of November. Google still rules the roost, owning 66% of all searches. To put this into context, 18.1 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November, with Google ranking first with 12.1 billion. Bing ranked second with 3.3 billion searches, followed by Yahoo with 2 billion, Ask Network with 464 million and AOL, Inc. with 253 million. So with an 8.8 billion search difference between Google and Bing, the question remains: Does Bing matter for SEO?
The answer? Sort of.
While Bing’s numbers don’t seem impressive all by themselves, it’s important to note that the total number of searches occurring on Bing has doubled since 2009.
Bing’s Key Relationships
In 2012, Bing began powering all Yahoo searches. Comscore shows Yahoo search traffic at 11.2% market share. So if you combine the numbers for Bing and Yahoo, you’re suddenly talking about 30% of all searches.
Facebook introduced Graph Search in 2013, along with a key partnership with Bing. Graph search allows users to search for people, places, and things within their social network. For example, a person planning a trip to Chicago may want to search for “Restaurants in Chicago that my friends like.” But Facebook isn’t able to handle each and every query, so for those that it can’t handle the social network defaults to Bing. Does Bing matter? It does if you care about Facebook.
This is a critical relationship. As Google strong-arms users into Google Plus, Facebook is still the number one social network of choice. And slowly but surely, it’s becoming a search engine. If Facebook can maintain users’ trust as Google continues to slowly alienate the masses, it could help Bing continue to capture major market share – assuming they are able to maintain their relationship with Facebook.
Organic Keyword Data And The AdWords Push
Earlier this year, Google encrypted all organic keyword referral data. But Bing still openly provides this information to web marketers. This information can be used to infer visitor behavior for the big picture.
Despite what Google says at conferences and in press releases, most of the search community understands that the switch to encryption of all organic keyword data was a way to push people into spending money on AdWords.
Businesses like AdWords because it’s an automatic way to rank. They can see their precise ROI and there isn’t much room for marketers to fudge numbers or success rates. And Google likes it because they actually make money off of PPC advertising as opposed to the SEO companies reaping the financial rewards for organic rankings.
But not everyone can afford AdWords. And if there is a sudden rush of new businesses into the AdWords community, it’s going to further push Mom-and-Pop shops out of the running. But Bing advertising is a viable option for many of these companies. Budgets are typically smaller, and the playing field is a bit more even.
Optimizing For Bing
Bing provides webmaster guidelines for those who are interested in optimizing their sites to be found in their search engine. You’ll find that their guidelines are very similar to Google’s.
Tips for optimizing for Bing include:
- Create quality content.
- Links are used to discover new content.
- Paid links, link schemes, and general link-building manipulation will result in penalties.
- Load time matters.
- Sitemaps and robots.txt files are important.
- Flash cannot be read.
- Canonical tags should be used.
- Title tags should be 65 characters and meta descriptions should be 160 characters.
- Internal links and external links are important.
- URLs and coding should be clean.
- Keyword usage is important to help Bing understand what your pages are about.
- Social cues matter.
One major difference between Bing and Google is that Bing is upfront about social cues. Google tends to downplay the importance of social sharing, despite test after test illustrating that social shares matter. Since Bing is so closely tied to Facebook, they are more upfront about the importance of a social presence.
Overall, the tips for optimizing for Bing are the same as for optimizing for Google. If you’re following all of the typical SEO best practices, your site should do well in both search engines.
So Does Bing Matter For SEO?
For most websites, optimizing for Google should be your main focus, but it’s important to keep in mind that Bing is becoming more relevant each year. There are some serious issues with Bing that keep many marketers from embracing it. But as long as they maintain their key partnerships with Facebook and Yahoo, their numbers will likely continue to grow at a steady pace. For businesses unhappy with their PPC budgets, Bing is a viable option. Bing took the opportunity to maximize on some of Google’s public relations blunders this year, and many marketers are happy with the results they are getting from Bing. So does Bing matter for SEO? It depends on your business goals and your approach. It’s important to keep your expectations realistic. But with the right approach, your experience with Bing will be what you make of it.