Is Bing good competition for Google?

A lot has been discussed lately regarding the growth of Microsoft’s Bing, but how fast is it really growing?  And is its current gain in market share due to the number of people checking out the new search engine?

I think many are keeping a close eye on the new decision engine, wondering how it works and often running comparisons between Google and Bing. But the main difference lies in that Bing helps users make better choices empowering them to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions, as their press release states it.

A significant fact that has caught people’s attention is that Bing has a lower bounce rate than all the other search engines out there.

Microsoft’s press release also highlights that previous results from a comScore study across core search engines showed that as many as 30% of searches are abandoned without satisfactory results. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.

A more recent study by comScore revealed Microsoft’s share of the search market rose to 8.9% in July from 8.4% in June.

So as a marketer, how can you gain a high rank on this new search engine? I guess many of us are asking ourselves the same question. For starters, I would say that many of the principles that you put in practice with all other engines would also apply to Bing.

For instance, interesting and original content matters big time. Page titles, keywords all should be relevant and appropriate to the content of your site.

How about signing up with Bing and managing your analytics with them. Try running a PPC campaign. Its been said they have a reputation for delivering better conversion rates and ROI.

In the meantime, do you think it’s good for Google to have more competition? What do you think the panorama will be like in a few months time?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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