Why Microsoft Bing won't boost your web site traffic

01/06/09 posted by Michael Sharkey

The recent launch of Microsoft's latest attempt at search, Bing was met with a warm welcome from the press. But will Bing bring your web site more visitors and conversions? We don't think so, and here is why:

Lack of Attention to Australian Market

We were promised a decision engine, a tool that could find the best price for shopping, travel and locate the perfect local business at the touch of a button. What the Australian market got was a rebranded version of Live Search (so it seems).

The lack of attention to the Australia market, to date, has seen a poor adoption to Bing. According to Stat Counter the United States has seen the largest adoption of Bing, possibly the result of a 100 million dollar marketing campaign from Microsoft. Below is a comparison graph of Bing's performance in Australia to the United States:

It appears the strength of the publicity and marketing surrounding the launch of Bing in the United States has had a significant dent in Google's market share in a short period of time. This trend information is no indication of Bing's continued success as this increase in market share is often seen surrounding the release of new products.

Evidently in the graph representing Australia we see little interest in the featureless Bing in comparison to the feature heavy United States Bing.

Decision Engine = Less Click Through

The idea of a search engine acting as a decision engine is Microsoft's description of the ability for Bing to easily compare and select the best rates for shopping, airfares and travel. The problem for businesses is their information is being utilised by Bing to provide this decision which will inevitably mean less click through for business web sites. Less click through means a reduction in lead generation, advertising revenue and brand awareness. So Bing may actually see a reduction in click through from the previous Live Search by Microsoft.

A Bad Track Record

Microsoft don't have the best record when it comes to search, late last year an attempt was made by the company to acquire search engine, Yahoo! which failed in negotiation. Microsoft's search engine at the time, Live, failed to acquire market share and relied on Yahoo!'s search marketing software to power their sponsored link opportunities. Bing's success if anyones guess but history is not in Microsoft's favour, nor the fact they are up against search giant Google.

How can I optimise my site for Microsoft Bing?

Optimising your web site for the Australian Bing should be no different then optimising for any major search engine. You need quality content, reputable links and strong on page optimisation. One observation of Microsoft's previous search engine, LIVE was that it paid more attention to META data then Google, that is, content included in META tags in the HTML. At this stage Bing's market share in the Australian market is so small your time is better focused on Google, but it might be time to dramatically improve your overall SEO so people are binging you in no time!