I have a confession to make. I barely exist in Bing and Yahoo search results for any of my top keyphrases. I’m up there for my primary, but my secondaries are lagging.
To be fair, I don’t optimize for Bing. I haven’t, anyway, though today I checked out this Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet and it turns out I’m following Bing’s suggestions for optimization, so I’m a little bit confused by their results.
When I search for “Nanaimo SEO”, the top two results make sense, sort of – they’ve been doing SEO longer than me and Bing favours historic results. The third result is for a travel blog owned by an SEO guy. Two of the results are companies based out of Vancouver, one is out of Calgary, one is a business directory and one is an accountant.
Check out the screen shot.
According to the previously mentioned article on Search Engine Journal Bing has 30% of the search market share (including Yahoo), so it would seem that I’m losing a significant amount of traffic to my competitors. It might seem, to the casual observer, that I’ve ignored an opportunity.
Except I don’t believe their data.
I looked at my stats and the stats of several of my clients. If I’m being conservative, I would say that Bing and Yahoo collectively represent 5% of the overall search traffic.
To be especially fair, we’re talking about 5 different sites in 5 vastly different industries with very different marketing strategies. The numbers I’m using are based on about 35,000 visits over a 6 month period.
I’ll still try and boost my rankings in Bing, just not at the expense of my Google ranks. I’m interested in other numbers though, if anyone (locally) can show me numbers that support Bing’s supposed 30% (or anything above 15%), I’d love to hear about it.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on May 24, 2011 at 10:22 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.