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Do Your Customers Bing?

Something interesting that seems to keep popping up is Bing’s blind test to put their search results up against Google’s. They are calling it “Bing it On”. (Here is the page if you want to do the blind test and see what you come up with: http://www.bingiton.com/) We tried it and actually out of the 5 searches that you are required to do, Bing won two out of the five.

So, that got us wondering about people using Bing. Do a lot of people use it compared to Google? Who uses Bing? How should business owners leverage Bing?

To start, Bing is actually owned by Microsoft. It was launched about three years ago in June of 2009. It is considered a web search engine and competes with Google. (In terms of ranking, Google is first, Bing is second and Yahoo! is third. Although it appears that Bing actually powers Yahoo! so it doesn’t really matter. ) At the end of the day, Google is way ahead. Depending on who you talk to, Google has between 65-70% of the share on searches.

What is kind of interesting is the breakdown between Google versus Bing users. You see, when you do a search on Bing your results will appear much as they do with a Google search but you are also going to see social media results as well. (Basically this means that you are going to see anything that your “friends” have liked, searched, researched, etc. as part of the results. So, if you are looking up restaurants in a certain city, you will actually see which of your friends have maybe recommended a restaurant in that city.) So, Bing users tend to be people who are more interested in getting personal insights or recommendations from friends rather than what Google might display. According to some articles we came across, Bing is actually trying to innovate and leverage the idea of social search and make their own market share rather than compete directly with Google.

What is interesting is that when most people consider SEO (search engine optimization) strategies, they just think about how their business will rank in a Google search. You can actually have a similar strategy for Bing as well. To succeed with a strong SEO strategy with Bing is just like what you would do for Google. It is all about putting quality content on your website.

Bing’s presence in the search engine world is something to keep an eye on. But at this point it seems to make sense to focus your efforts on getting strong Google results as long as people “Google” things rather than “Bing” them.

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