SearchEngineOptimisation.com, only one way up

A popular function on Google is the ability to find products at competitive prices through their shopping feed. Their Google Offers service also helps people to find great local deals, as does Yahoo Local Offers and other social coupon searches.

Bing has now decided to follow suit, and has launched Bing Deals in the United States. It currently has over 200,000 offers across the country for over 14,000 towns. It works by collating offers and data from sites and services such as Groupon, Living Social and more in its search results, to find the best deal possible for people in their area.

Instead of working internally to create their own code, Bing Deals has been created by partnering the search engine with Dealmap, and lets users search for offers by location and category. It can also be accessed by mobile, and geolocation services can help searchers what they want when they’re on the move.

Bing Mobile’s director of product management recently said: “Bing’s mission is to help you cut through the clutter of the web to make decisions more quickly – whether that’s through our own innovations or by teaming up with industry experts.”

With the majority of search engines on the web – especially the most popular ones – offering social coupon and deal services, it shows just how much they feel providing local discounts and deals can help them grow in the future. It should also help to improve local SEO and help local businesses, providing they’ve signed up of course!

Making the most out of your deals online is crucial for sustained success, and signing up to social media services that can get word of your offers out there on a viral basis is a great way to improve your reputation and generate interest about your business.

They say that actions speak louder than words. There’s been a lot of controversy over the last few weeks between Google and Bing, with the former claiming the Microsoft’s search platform has been copying some of its results. Bing responded rejecting the allegation, and can now also point to data released by online analytics source, Experian Hitwise, which shows that Bing’s results are more accurate than Google’s.

According to the research, Bing’s results (and Yahoo’s, also powered by Bing) carried an 81 per cent success rate throughout January 2011. Google’s results were much lower, carrying only a 65 per cent success rate. This isn’t a one-off slice of good fortune for Bing either – these results were the same during December 2010, showing that Bing’s success rate has been consistently high for a while.

But how do you define success rate in the search world? Well, from Experian’s point of view, success rate is gauged and measured by when a searcher clicks on a result. But it’s important to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Despite the healthy success rate, Bing still has a veritable slither of the search market when compared to Google’s global dominance.

But if that momentum carries on and Bing continues to offer a better service than Google, then they’ll inevitably pick up stragglers who want a change from Google’s normal search function. When it comes to a search engine optimisation campaign, we always stress that it’s important to optimise with the user in mind first and foremost, and not angle your campaign and SEO services towards any specific search engine.

Though Google has a larger slice of the market, the above data seems to indicate that Bing has a higher success rate when it comes to actual clicks. By making sure that your campaign covers all search bases, and shows that you have users and visitors in your thoughts more than anything, you can’t go wrong.

Well, in the United States, certainly. As of November 2010 Bing cornered more of the search market, and made up more ground on Yahoo. Great news for Microsoft, especially as they’ve invested heavily in promoting the search engine across the USA.

Research specialists Compete have estimated that searches through Bing in the US have risen to 14.4 per cent from 10.2 per cent (year on year), whilst Google searches have fallen from 73.4 per cent to 66.4 percent. Don’t forget though, that Bing have been powering Yahoo’s search results since August 2010. So, that effectively brings the total of ‘Bing-powered searches’ to 29 per cent for November.

So Microsoft has the bit between their teeth – as these figures suggest – in what is the world’s largest and most-profitable search market. Impressive, especially when you consider Bing has only been active since 2009.

If Microsoft’s Bing strategy remains as aggressive in a global context then the worldwide search market will potentially even out. That’s why it’s so important, when optimising a site for SEO marketing purposes, to concentrate on all areas of your campaign instead of targeting the largest search engine at the time with the biggest slice of the pie.

Remember to always provide a fantastic user experience first and foremost when it comes to SEO services. Though it is important to rank naturally in organic results to increase your visibility for certain terms, you should never optimise for search engines alone.

Creating a great user experience is the best way to get that organic traffic returning to your website on a regular basis, whether you’re optimising for Bing, Google, Yahoo or another search platform. Once you have earned the trust and respect of your visitors then it’s only a matter of time before your campaign becomes a success.

As of the 24^th of August 2010 yahoo announced it was official that their US and Canada results from their search engine will be coming from Bing and not their Search Engine.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/2010/08/24/yahoo-transitions-organic-search-back-end-to-microsoft-platform/

It is understood that this will be rolled out globally and will at some point impact all searches done through yahoo. This is the biggest shake up in the search engine world for a long time.

The impact this will have on SEO and sites on the web is difficult to gauge. Rankings across all 3 search engines can be dramatically different. So those who relied on or got alot of traffic through ranking well in Yahoo will now have this traffic source cut off completely.

In my experience i have seen sites ranking 1 in yahoo but not even noticed by Bing as it seems to be pickier in when it decides to discover a site. To try and get a grasp on how this will affect the world of search engines it’s good to look at how the market share will look like before and after this change in the UK.

Market share of search engines before and after:

• Google: 85.64%

• Bing: 3.55%
• Yahoo! Search UK & Ireland: 2.62%
• Other: 8.19%

After switch:

• Google: 85.64%
• Bing: 6.17%
• Other: 8.19%

Bing has significantly stepped up it’s marketing with lots of tv ads and sponsors popping up everywhere.  So this market share could change as more and more people are exposed to Bing.

Not only with advertising but Bing are going for an overhaul in trying to go after the savvy and the advanced user by adding Bing webmaster tools. Allowing insights like this is beneficial because if Bing was to achieve any significant market share. People in the SEO business will be able to target Bing much more affectively.

The fact that this has come quite suddenly in The US and Canada and slow to other countries is very beneficial to us. We can strategise accordingly and try to affectively focus on two search engines instead of the three.

However the importance of this will be known over time because for now Google is still the main and significant target of Internet Marketers as it is where most of the traffic comes from.