Bing is Microsoft’s version of a search engine, similar to Google. While Google is the industry leader in the market today, Bing is trying to grab a piece of Google’s market share. Search engines primarily generate their money from internet marketers paying the company per click (or impression) to advertise their website by keyword.
Highly clicked keywords tend to cost more per click due to the amount of users that use the keyword in a search. The biggest part of search engine optimization is to create websites that can be found on the search engines within the first few pages. This increases the number of visitors and thus conversions.
This raises an important question: is Bing an effective search engine for generating traffic? If it isn’t then internet marketers shouldn’t spend time and money attempting to target Bing users.
To answer this question: Yes and no. Bing is effective in certain areas of the world and not in others. This all relates to their marketing strategy and advertising. In the United States, there are many more advertisements for Bing than for Google. The difference being that Google has become a household name and doesn’t need to advertise.
A few areas that make Bing an effective search engine are:
- Dominant in some territories
- Brings targeted traffic
- Graphical User Interface (GUI)
The primary advantage of Bing is that it is the dominant search engine in some areas of the world. In turn, this brings in much more targeted traffic. Consequently in an emerging market where Bing dominates, an internet marketer will be quite successful. Another advantage is the easy to use graphical user interface that makes transactions a breeze.
There are two areas that Bing is not effective including:
- Lack of overall traffic
- Slow at indexing pages
These are two extremely important areas. Google holds a huge chunk of the search engine market while others, such as Bing are trying to catch up. With a lack of overall traffic, it can be unprofitable to pump money into advertising nobody will see. Also, with slow indexing of new pages, this costs the web owner money since nobody knows the page is there during the index interval.
In general, Bing is effective when simply targeting a specific geographic area. With a lack of overall traffic, it may not be profitable to invest in Bing just yet. Microsoft is constantly working on this decision engine to improve traffic, so stick around; Bing might give Google a run for their money.
