Just Search Blog
Just Search Blog
Over the past six months Bing has been very active, investing heavily in marketing to help increase the awareness of their service. In this post, we have reviewed the methods Bing has been adopting to promote their brand and increase their share of the search market. We have managed to capture some real data to see if Bing’s marketing efforts have had any impact. Finally, we will discuss Google’s reaction to Bing, and what our thoughts are for the future of these two search engines and whether this has any impact upon search engine optimisation.
What are Bing doing?
The most obvious of Bing’s promotional campaigns has been their current TV campaign which I am sure the majority of you will have seen. Other methods of promotion have not been so obvious to the general public, but Bing has definitely been clever in trying to cover all angles.
The biggest effort Bing has made is their ten year partnership deal with Yahoo, which will see Bing powering the Yahoo natural search results. Yahoo currently has the second largest search engine audience and so the partnership will allow Bing to access this.
In addition to the Yahoo partnership, Bing has invested heavily into social media. The launch of bing.com/twitter and bing.com/social allows users to search the content of Twitter and Facebook; the results of which will include relevant tweets and Facebook Fan page updates. From within Facebook itself, users can also utilise the web search option, which is again, powered by Bing. The social media market is growing fast and so capturing these audiences only serves to increase Bing’s influence.
Some other techniques which Bing has utilised include trying to coin the phrase “Binged it” or to “Bing it”. More recently Bing has made promotional efforts in the UK, taking a Bing-styled ice cream van out in London and giving away free ice creams. It is obvious that Bing has made real efforts towards trying to capture search engine audiences, but are these methods working?
Looking at the statistics
At Just Search we have access to a large amount of search data, using Google Analytics data from five high traffic websites, each from different industries, we were able compare natural search statistics between two time frames:
01/11/09 – 30/11/2009 compared to 01/05/2010 – 31/05/2010
Data from Google Analytics has been exported into Excel, so that we can interrogate this data to show you our findings. This first graph compares the percentage difference of natural traffic from Google between the two time periods.
This next graph displays the percentage difference in natural traffic coming from Bing and Yahoo.
This last graph sums up our findings and shows the difference in traffic between the three major search engines. The results seem to vary across industries. For example, in the carpet industry you can clearly see that there has been an increase in traffic from Google. Whereas in other industries such as equipment exchange, traffic from Google has decreased by almost 3% while Bing’s has risen quite significantly.
From looking at the stats it is clear that Bing is defiantly having an impact, even though it is relatively small. So are Google seeing this as a threat?
Google’s reaction to the Bing swing
Since Bing’s creation in May 2009, colleagues have talked about how Bing could be a competitor of Google. If Bing approach marketing in the correct way they could have a huge impact on Google’s stronghold.
12 months on and Google’s reaction to Bing has been very obvious. There have been a number of changes that Google has implemented to cut out the progression (however small) made by Bing, including:
Conclusion
From a social perspective Google and Bing are not too dissimilar in market share. Google has always been the big gun and whether it is on TV or the Internet, they are still the search engine that most people talk about. However Bing has invested a lot recently into getting their brand established in people’s minds, such as the saying “I just Binged it”. Obviously this is a reused phrase and has been adapted from “Googled it” but it has helped in the marketing drive that Bing are pushing.
It in terms of offline marketing, Bing has released TV adverts which are aimed at creating a big buzz about how they have anything that you are searching for.
“You Talking to Me”
“Now Go Walk out the Door”
These adverts were launched to create the slogan ‘Bing and Decide’, which has worked really well for them as these have been very notable adverts which will stay in people’s minds.
From a SEO point of view though, there is not a lot of difference between the two search engines. You would have to spend some time trying to find a page that has web results that are majorly different between Bing and Google.
Dave’s View
My own opinion is that Google is, for the foreseeable future at least, going to dominate when it comes to traffic but Bing are approaching this huge task of toppling Google in the correct way.
Bing are never going to beat Google through traffic alone, but they can dent them through other means such as becoming the search engine for Facebook, TV Advertising and using slogans.
Dave Stopher can be followed at http://twitter.com/davestopherseo
Gemma’s View
As things stand at the moment, I don’t think that Google have a lot to worry about. Yes, Bing has undertaken a huge promotional campaign and has definitely taken big steps forward in terms of capturing the social media audiences, but as the stats show, their progress has been relatively small and this has not yet had any major impact upon Google.
I do think that that this may change in the future, especially as the two giants continue to enter each other’s markets with things such as the Google Chrome Operating System and Microsoft web-apps. If Bing continues as it has done so far I can see it becoming a major competitor to Google’s monopoly.
Gemma Neesham can be followed at http://twitter.com/seofocusuk
Ahmed’s View
I’ve been following Bing closely ever since its inception and personally, I’m impressed. You might be aware that Microsoft have changed their business ethos in recent times, interacting with the community more and not keeping their doors closed. It seems they have now realised the larger threat across all industries.
In the search business, Microsoft are aware that they can’t just topple Google overnight and so have made a smart move and invested heavily in alternative avenues (such as Facebook, foursquare and the recent deal with Opera and Apple).
And of course, most internet users love to use Facebook. For example, anything Facebook do will be liked by Facebook users and so in the long term, Microsoft’s image will be improved. To back this up Microsoft are investing in other advertising sources.
Finally, Microsoft are making groundbreaking updates to all their major services such as MSN.com, Hotmail, Messenger, Windows Phone and Xbox, etc. What does all this mean? Think about it, Bing will be available to use on Facebook, Windows Phone 7, Hotmail, Xbox, Messenger, MSN and hundreds of other services.
In my opinion, over the next 12 months, more people are going to use all the services mentioned above and this is going to attack Google like it never has done before.
I think Bing is going to become a much more utilised search engine in the near future and begin to catch up to Google. Bing results are already great!
Ahmed Bhula can be followed at http://twitter.com/topnotchseo
Web Design, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the UK and World
The Bing adverts are terrible! They just spout irrelevant strings of information tied together with a keyword much like the way the Bing search engine works.
Unless they overhaul their search engine it will not compete with Google the advertising misses the mark and with a shoddy product has become a joke rather than good promotion. Yes people are talking about Bing but not using it. The only thing Google has to worry about is their own knee jerk reaction to the competition they have tried to introduce things too quickly to stay ahead of the new competitors but this has not worked due to oversights on privacy, and not enough thorough testing this will put people off using Google a bit if they continue to make such mistakes but not because Bing is a serious competitor at the moment.
Bing seems to have grown much quicker than I remember Google doing so. i read an article the other week talking about Google vs. Bing and was an interesting read.
Really showed how Google produces more exact search terms were as Bing seems to pick up more and more varied results. I find it strange how an amazingly well optimised site can be top of google and then for the same phrase seems to appear nowhere in Bing.
could this see a shift in the way people optimise so that they get results for both Google and Bing?
Thanks for sharing this article though, haven’t really used Bing since reading first article last week.
I think Google are in danger of putting profits ahead of user experience.
The amount of Google products (shopping, images, maps, etc.) dominating first page positions for a lot of competitive searches is crazy – reducing the number of organic results on the first page can only make the page less relevant to a user.
In my opinion it makes this push by Bing come at just the right time for them to possibly make a dent in the market as users finally start to look at alternatives to the now cluttered Google.
Bing has made an impact in the last six months, albeit a small impact, and perhaps this growth is more rapid than Google’s originally was, but I think this is because Bing can see the competition ahead which is why it is aggressively promoting the service. Microsoft is a huge company with a lot to prove in this industry. There is also a bigger search engine market to capture than there ever was for Google back when they launched in 1996.
It is interesting to see how the two search engines differ in some of their results, but for now I don’t think that Bing has made a big enough impact for people to change the way they optimise sites.