Google is God when it comes to organic search. In fact, the word “Google” has even become a verb for doing online research. Even if we didn’t actually use Google at all. That’s pretty incredible, right? Odds are that most people on the planet use Google when they complete an online search, though. As of January 2021, Google hosted nearly  92.47% of the world’s online searches, but that still leaves the other 7.53%. A majority of this percentage is powered by Bing. At this point, you may ask; is that percentage even notable enough to care about? Is it Worth it to Optimize Your Business Website on Bing? If it is, what are the behaviors of Bing users and do they fall into a set demographic? We’ll answer these questions and more!

Search Engines Other Than Google

There are a number of search engines other than Google. Their user base is much smaller and some of them have been the victim of memes and jokes over the years (we’re looking at you, Bing), but that doesn’t mean that their ROIs are anything to laugh at. Many search platforms have risen and fallen over the last few decades- having been acquired by larger companies- some of which people haven’t used since the late 90s and early 2000s.

• Google: 85,86%
• Bing: 6.84%
  • Yahoo!: 2.76%
• Baidu: 0.55%
• Yandex: 0.59%
• Other: 3.4%

(Stats according to Statista.com)

Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two largest competitors for search engine supremacy in the US, but there are a number of smaller search engines with special features in the other category. We’ll talk about them and how they work in a different blog post.

Bing’s Organic Search

Just because your site ranks well on Google does not mean it ranks well on Bing, too. The reason for this is that these search engines have different ways of returning search results to users based on the text they typed into the search bar. In short, a result that did not grace Google’s top three pages might show up on Bing’s.

Exact Match Domains: Or, only results matching the exact text input are returned to the user. Sticking to verbatim keyphrases and keywords will help with this.

Use Bing Places: When you list and claim your business on Bing Places, your local SEO performance will improve exponentially. You can improve your business by improving SEO through Bing’s Webmaster Tools. By adding this component to your marketing toolkit, you can employ categories and tags to help Bing understand your website’s content.

On-Page SEO is Key: Bing likes verbatim in-text keywords and phrases in H2 page headers, meta descriptions and web content much more than it likes any SEO done off-page.

Social Media Presence Matters: Bing factors in social media search rankings, as well- so ensure that your business is ranking well on those sites, too. A consistent, genuine social media presence factors more heavily into Bing’s algorithm than it does on Google’s.

Unique Content: When you create SEO-optimized unique content between 2,100-2,400 words, Bing will reward your site in its algorithm. It values quality over quantity, so taking that into account will be important when optimizing for Bing.

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

Why Optimize Your Site for Bing?

Higher ROI: Analytically, Bing users on average have a lower bounce rate and are much more likely to spend not only more time on your webpage, but to subscribe to your website’s email and engage with more affiliate links.

Lower Competition: In 2019, 126 million users in the United States alone performed 6 billion Bing-powered searches. That year, Bing owned 36% of the US desktop search market. Here’s what that says to us: that’s a lot of business to be missing out on! With less competition, it’s so much easier for your marketing strategies to cut through the noise and bring more unique users to your website.

Windows Devices Bring in Bing Searches: There are loads of PC users that own Windows devices globally, and for those devices, Bing is the default home search engine. There are a staggering 1.5 billion Windows-powered devices, and 900 million of them are supported by Windows 10 which directs a lot of search traffic through Bing.

Cortana and Alexa Voice Search: As voice search is a digital marketing trend of 2021 and because Alexa and Cortana are 2 of the 3 most widely-used personal assistant AIs on the market today, and they are both powered by Bing, not optimizing for them is an error that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Yahoo! is Powered by Bing: Yahoo! is the third most-used search engine, and it’s also powered by Bing, therefore it uses the same algorithm.

Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

Bing’s User Demographic

According to Wordstream, Bing users typically:

• Average 45 years of age 
• Are more educated. Half of all Bing users have a college degree, and 17% of those have an advanced degree.
• Have a higher socioeconomic status. A third of Bing users have household incomes of over $100K
• Spend More. Bing users spend 35% more money than the average Google user.
• Are Married, where 30% are parents
• Tend to focus on automotive, real estate, and travel-based purchases.

Take the stress and work out of your business’s website optimization by letting Promotion LA handle the SEO optimization of your business webpage. We’ll ensure that we optimize your business website on Bing and Google alike. Drop us a line to increase your web traffic conversion rate!