Bing is gaining momentum on Google and as a webmaster you shouldn’t give up on Bing web traffic as a solid source of new visitors.
While Google remains the world’s most popular and widely used search engine, Bing is slowly gaining momentum on its competitor. According to the latest comScore report, Google captured 63.4% of all U.S. searches in November 2015, followed by Bing with 20.9%, and Yahoo in a distant third with just 12.5%. What’s interesting is that Microsoft’s search engine continues to trend upwards, with more people using Bing with each passing month.
So, how is Microsoft able to covert Internet users over to its Bing search engine? It wasn’t long ago when Bing was nothing more than a money pit for Microsoft, with financial reports indicating that it was losing $1 billion per quarter. It’s safe to say those days are long gone, as Microsoft continues to beef up its search engine with new features and greater visibility.
Among the many reasons why Internet users are switching to Bing is because it’s already packaged with many devices. If you purchased a Surface tablet, for instance, you’ll notice the default search engine is Bing. The same is true for the Microsoft Edge, as well as Windows smartphones.
Furthermore, Mozilla recently announced that it was ditching Google as the default search engine for its FireFox web browser, replacing it with Yahoo. Why is this important? Well, Yahoo Search is actually powered by Bing, so you’ll notice many of the same results when performing searches on Yahoo and Bing.
As a webmaster, you shouldn’t overlook Bing Search as a source of traffic. Assuming this trend continues, it will remain a significant source of web traffic for many business owners. Thankfully, Microsoft offers several tools and how-to guides to help webmasters optimize their properties for higher Bing rankings. The Bing SEO Analyzer, for instance, is a free-to-use tool that will analyze your site’s pages to ensure they follow Bing’s best practices. Upon entering your site’s URL, the tool will scan your pages and offer suggestions on how to improve them for better rankings.
You may also want to follow the Bing Search Quality Blog. This blog is managed by Bing’s Search Quality team, posting helpful information on search optimization, as well as new trends and features that are being added to Bing Search.
Bing’s search traffic may fall short of Google, but it’s still the second most popular search engine. Therefore, webmasters and bloggers should optimize their web properties for higher Bing rankings. Doing so will yield more traffic, and ultimately more sales/conversions.
