Bing – Why Search Marketers Should Pay Attention

Some of the most interesting takeaways beyond Bing’s steady increase in market share, is the 4% lift in spend by Bing users, of which, 57M+ exclusively use the Bing search platform. The 23% increase in likelihood of purchase from Bing users over users from others search engines is a another reason that search marketers should take note.

Bing for Search Marketers: Why they should take note

Bing’s rise to 30% search engine market share in the US has been slow but steady. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the story about the race between to the tortoise and the hare. Last I checked, Bing had 12 consecutive quarters of winning search market share from Google and as we all know, competition is necessary for innovation. Google+ will provide the same drive for innovation to facebook over time in the social realm.

One of the Interesting things to note is that as a result of the Bing/Yahoo! relationship, Yahoo! Site Explorer will be deprecated (retired) and search marketers will now have to find alternative sources of competitive link information. That is to say that Bing webmaster tools will continue to provide link data from the Yahoo! link database, but only for websites that users own and have verified ownerships rights to.

The good news is that there are other great data providers such as the SEOMoz and Majestic who offer similar, enhanced data available on market as a whole that can be used to gather competitive intelligence but all known tools have an associated licensing fee. eBiz ROI relies on SEOMoz for its competitive link profiling and link building efforts and find that is a great tool for this task. Bottom line is that it appears that the days of Yahoo! Site Explorer providing free, competitive link data are sadly drawing near to an end. The reality is that Yahoo! site explorer lacked key data about the value of individual links that makes tools like Open Site Explorer with the licensing fee.

For an interesting discussion on the topic from an SEO perspective, the video below, featuring Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Duane Forester of Bing offers some interesting expert perspectives. Rand and Duane delve into some of the new and exciting roadmap features of Bing and even shares some of the aspects of how Bing builds their roadmap and why search marketers, and SEOs in particular, should pay attention.

Pump Up The Bing – SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday

Some of the most interesting takeaways from this discussion, for me at least, is the 4% lift in spend by Bing users, of which, 57M+ exclusively use the Bing search platform. Also, the 23% increase in likelihood of purchase from Bing users over users from others search engines user base.

These are all great reasons for search marketers to pay attention to Bing. Traffic is good, but conversions are better. I, for one, am looking forward to using enhancements to Bing’s webmaster tools.