Mediarun Search Marketing News

Travel and shopping are key areas for Bing search engine optimisation

August 2nd 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

The gradual ascent of Bing's search engine market share has been closely monitored by the popular press. Microsoft's search engine still lags way behind Google and accounts for just under ten per cent of total searchers, according to recent figures from Experian Hitwise. Of course, this means that the focus for practically every SEO Company, when it comes to website optimisation, is Google.

With a whopping 72 per cent market share, Google's supremacy doesn't look like it is even close to be challenged by a rival service and Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer has conceded that he has no idea if the future of search engine optimisation will ever swing in Microsoft's favour.

Speaking at Microsoft's recent Financial Analyst Meeting, Ballmer was reported by eWeek as saying: "We're not confused. We've got a lot of work to do here. We're not confused that investors see the big price tag to get into this business and say, 'What's the progress going to look like on that?'"

In fact, Bing's financial future continues to look uncertain, with Microsoft's Online Services registering a quarterly loss of some $696 million (£438 million). But this doesn't mean that SEO agencies should drop Bing from their search engine optimisation strategies altogether - far from it.

Bing is making considerable amounts of headway in certain market sectors, racking up substantial upstream traffic growth in categories such as travel, shopping, automotive and health care.

And as Bing focuses on, in the words of Ballmer, building "a lot of brand buzz", certain "non-traditional areas" could become an important aspect of search engine marketing campaigns

Meanwhile, Bing director Stefan Weitz recently told eWeek that these non-traditional areas are something that could separate the search engine from its rivals.

"As we look at how people are using the web itself and how the web is changing, we think we can expand that which people do with these engines," he said.

"The more exciting place, and the place we're looking at more often, is how we expand the art of the possible in search."

It all sounds fairly specious, but essentially Microsoft is going to continue investing money in Bing, and if its market share continues to climb it will eventually become an aspect of search engine optimisation which cannot be ignored.

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