SEOs: Think Bing, Not Google

In October 2010, Microsoft completed the migration of Yahoo organic search results to Bing-Powered results. With that single move, Bing now controls about 33% of Search engine market share. In January 2011, they completed their deal with Conduit adding another 2 points of market share. For the last couple of months, Bing has consistently added a point here and there. If you look at Comscore numbers every month, Bing is slow and steadily adding market share.

And yet every search conference I go to, people keeping stamping on each other over Google – trying to juice out that last drop of optimization by SEO’ing for Google. While this definitely is a great short term strategy (think: job security), the lack of attention to the long term strategy of SEO’ing for Bing could be costly to most search engine marketers. At the last conference I attended, Elite Retreat, I asked a group of noted SEO specialists what they are doing to SEO for Bing? They looked at me like I was smoking dope.

And yet the numbers don’t lie.

And here are the some key things to keep in mind:
– Bing is already powering about 33% of search — and growing.
– The value of an organic referral from Bing is almost 50% more than that for Google [Chitika Research]
– While Google is currently the king of Search, a lot of its traffic is actually controlled by 3rd parties. That 3rd party traffic (similar to Conduit defecting to Bing) could switch in an instant.

Key players in this 3rd party traffic game:
– Apple (Google is currently the default search provider on iPhones – how long that will last is anybody’s guess)
– ISPs like Comcast, Charter, Earthlink, etc
– OEMs (Dell, HP, etc) [Thanks to these OEM deals, Google has a higher share than Bing as the default search on Microsoft IE — yes Microsoft Internet Explorer!]

The behavior of most SEO’s today reminds me of this scene from “A Beautiful Mind” involving Game Theory.