Loading ...Change normally causes a shake-up, the bigger the changes, the stronger the earthquake effect it can have. In May this year Microsoft launched Bing onto the world’s Internet users. Now everybody has grown used to Google being the king of the search engines with roughly 70 to 75% of the search engine market today. Google of course is not showing any signs of slowing down in the least.
So what does the launch of Bing mean to websites that have mostly targeted their optimisation efforts for Google? It is still extremely early days for Bing, but it is also natural that website owners will get into a tizzy and want some answers. To make wanting answers even more urgent, Microsoft has brought in innovations with Bing.
Decision engine
Bing is not described as a search engine, but instead is called a decision engine. What this means is that Bing focuses on delivering the best results in an organised manner. It aims to help users make decisions quicker. Bing includes features not used before, such as Price Predictor. This will help users get the best prices for products they are searching for.
Another feature is the compare and contrast function. This allows the searcher to do product, price and shipping against similar products. For business websites this is an excellent feature as the primary goal of all business websites is to get searchers to convert to paying clients. These are but two of the features of Bing that will have an impact on businesses.
Impact on SEO
What worries most people is that Bing will not display the customary 10 organic listings, but only 5. This means that some page one listings will move over to the second page. But Bing also displays other sets of results. These results centre on the results of others searching for similar products. Due to this multiple results sets; it gives SEO far greater capacity for using long tail key phrases. For instance if you have optimised for ‘Liverpool accommodation’, normally Liverpool would not show up. Bing picks up that Liverpool accommodation is a common search phrase and automatically includes precise results for Liverpool in the SERPs.
Conclusion
Does this mean you immediately have to change your SEO strategies? Not really because the optimisation tactics used still holds. It must also be remembered that Bing is in it’s initial phase. At this stage it is no threat to Google and websites that have targeted their optimisation efforts for Google. What it does mean is that Bing makes it more difficult to rank for search terms that are generic.
However, by using highly targeted long tail key phrases, you will rank well in the SERPs. In reality, competition is healthy, even for search engines and only the future will tell how well Bing will do. It means that everyone will have to dust off their optimisation techniques and do some tweaking. This is healthy as it freshens up everything.
Related posts:
- Optimisation for Bing
- Bing Maps to provide a superior service to that of Google?
- Helpful features from Bing search
- Don’t sideline Bing
- Microsoft’s Bing and Facebook working together more closely
Tags: Bing SEO, SEO For Bing
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