Posted By: Nicole Johnson, Account Manager
Don’t Discount Bing When Planning Your 2011 SEO Marketing Strategy
The buzz about Bing has saturated the online marketing industry over the past year, yet some marketers still are not paying much attention, and fewer still are taking action. We all know what Bing is, but not everyone knows how to change a marketing strategy to accommodate the growing search engine.
Despite marketing companies’ reluctance to evolve, a new partnership between Bing and seasoned search engine vet Yahoo (a.k.a YaBing), has positioned Bing for major growth in the coming year. We are already seeing changes, and Search Engine Land recently cited a study from comScore suggesting that Bing now controls 28 percent of all search traffic on the Web.
Bing can no longer be ignored. It simply isn’t enough to focus marketing efforts on search giants like Google anymore. According to a source with Search Engine Land, the search ad network Chikita has found that marketers who choose not to optimize their sites for Bing are losing out on as much as 9% of their potential search traffic—which could also translate into lost conversions!
ReviewerOfSites.com claims that Bing searchers are more likely than Google searchers to click on an ad or listing. They also claim that online marketers who fail to optimize their site for Bing are missing out on 13% of their potential click volume.
So what to do? There are a number of Bing optimization tips out there, but here are a few we thought were most helpful, courtesy of ReviewerOfSites.com:
- Check your robot.txt file to ensure that your site is allowing the Bing spider to crawl its content.
- The type of content on your site is also important according to the Daily Tech Post. Bing favors content that is between 300 and 500 words per page and gives more importance to the page title than to the page content.
- Check to make sure all site pages are actually being indexed by the search engine. Type ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ in the Bing search box, and hit Enter.
- Include Bing webmaster tools verification code on your site.
- Run your paid campaigns in Microsoft AdCenter to target Bing searchers.
