The whole SEO community was excited about the release of Bing, Microsoft’s revamped search engine. The new-ish search engine contained several innovative features that many thought would finally, after so many years, challenge the search engine superpower, Google. SEO experts waited. And waited. After a few fluctuations, Bing settled into only slightly more than the market share of MSN Live, Microsoft’s former search engine.

It’s very tempting to completely ignore Bing. In March 2010, the search market was still utterly dominated by Google, which held 65.5% of the total search market. Yahoo, exactly as it has been for around a decade now, came in second. Challenging Yahoo’s 16.8% market share was Bing, which, with 11.5% shows that Microsoft has managed to crowbar a few more market points from the other two main search engines since Bing was introduced. That left a tiny 6.2% for the world’s other search engines to share among themselves.

Bing – creeping up on Google and Yahoo

The creep in market share for Bing has been small, and slow, but it is there. Microsoft is certainly in a better position with Bing than it was with MSN, which was often the recipient of only around 7% of the world’s search traffic. Although Bing’s gains over the last few months have been in percentages of percentages, these still represent hundreds of thousands of searches. That’s significant.

The time is still far off when Bing can really threaten Google, if the search engine world’s third-place holder ever does. It’s still a little early to say that site owners should target Bing just in case the search engine’s popularity increases. There are, however, other reasons that a smart site owner takes Bing into consideration in developing their search engine optimisation campaign.

Choosing the field of least competition

Some SEO commentators are favouring a Bing campaign because it has a better chance of success. With so many search engine optimisation campaigns concentrating on Google, there is a relative lack of smart competition on Bing. Some experts simply consider Bing an easier target. While Google gets five or six times the search traffic than Bing, this traffic will pass you by if you’re unable to get onto the first page. If you aim for Bing, you’ve got a better chance of attracting traffic, or so some optimisation professionals think.

It’s a logical train of thought, but it doesn’t mean that a site should drop Google completely, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about this. The types of internet users who favour Bing over Google tend to be a definite group, with distinctive qualities. If your target users are devoted Google fans, appearing in the number one spot for all your keywords in Bing will get you nowhere.

It’s always important to do your research with SEO, and choosing the search engine to optimise for should make up a part of that research. At the moment, most optimisation experts still recommend that site owners make Google the target of their campaign. This doesn’t mean, however, that Bing should be completely sidelined. It can be worthwhile mounting a secondary campaign.