We’re always told (I’ve said it myself) that when optimising your site for search engines that Google is king and you may as well forget the rest. Now it’s certainly true that Google commands the lion’s share of the search market, but in my opinion it’s also a lot harder to rank well in Google. It’s kind of like choosing a super-competitive keyword versus a long-tail one: you know it’s better to own the competitive keyword, but it’s a lot easier to achieve a good ranking with the long-tail one.
The reason I mention this is I’ve noticed something surprising happening with one of my sites. It’s a niche site, optimised for a handful of related keywords (and when optimising I had Google in mind), and monetised with AdSense. It’s not getting a lot of traffic yet as it’s still quite new and ranked quite low for my target keywords (at the moment the best-ranked is on page 8 in Google), so what Google is sending me is long-tail traffic. The surprising thing is that I’m on page 1 in Bing for most of my keywords, and while the volume of traffic Bing is sending is still only about 25% of what Google is sending, here’s the thing: it’s targetted traffic matching my keywords!
The result is that I’m getting an AdSense CTR of about four times higher on the Bing traffic than the Google traffic and the 25% (targetted) Bing traffic has made me twice as much as the (semi-targetted) Google traffic!
Of course, all this was unintentional. I didn’t set out to rank well in Bing; it just happened as a side-effect of optimising with Google in mind. Just goes to show that after all is said and done the search engines aren’t really that different! But perhaps Bing finds my particular blend of SEO especially tasty? I don’t really know at this stage, but you can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye on my stats!
Would you care to share your own experiences of Bing optimisation? Feel free to leave a comment below…
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Hey, I did not know about Bing till now. I’m going to check this out. Thank you for sharing this valuable information.
To be honest I am still only looking at Google but I am seeing more and more traffic come from Bing though. When the amount of traffic reaches a significant level I’ll start paying attention to it. Until then I have more than enough to do with Google
Mikael
Just came across your site and I would like to share my comments and experience here. I believe all search engines aim for one thing – relevancy. So as long as you are optimizing your website with targeted keywords with proper anchor text for the backlinks, you’ll eventually rank well on all major search engines. It’s good to hear that you’ve achieved higher CTR with bing traffic. This must means you are on the right track with seo and on-page optimization with ads.
This is actually not surprising if you think about it.
Bing users are likely to be a little less technologically sophisticated than google users. They’re more likely to just search for what they want, find it, and buy it.
I’ve run a number of experiments that fit fairly neatly into the mold of what you’ve described above. That is, I’ve placed Adsense on sites, ended up ranking on Bing (MSN/Live at the time, but the users seem to be about the same), and saw that the conversion rates (click-through rates) from Bing were MUCH higher than either Yahoo! or Google. I’ve often wondered about this – the nature of the traffic from Bing is a bit more targeted than that from Google, but ultimately I think the USERS are making the difference. For me, a conversion is simply a click on Adsense, and it is my experience that those coming from MSN -> Live -> Bing are more likely to click on ads. I sense that this may be true of any action, but I haven’t tested that theory yet.
I get some traffic from bing myself. The traffic is as targeted as google’s but the quantity is not a whole lot. Google is the most popular SE amongst them all, that’s why it’s superior.
Cheers
even i am getting 40% of my organic traffic from bing only it is good but google still rocks
Bing does provide me with Traffic and has indexed my site way more than Google but as far as amount of Traffic it still doesn’t compare to Google. I concede targeted traffic is important but I feel that Bing and Google do that equally well.
I’ve had a similar experience with paid traffic– Adwords traffic tends to browse, while paid Bing traffic tends to convert. Adwords has more traffic available; Bing has fewer people killing time?
It’ll be interesting to see where we’re at after 6 more months of Bing’s TV ads… now that they’ve made them less annoying by half (“Search overload,” ugh).
I agree and have noticed that since its launching bing is consistently performing well and has given Google a healthy competition. But being the new player I hope it will take some time to be a real competitor of Google.
Thanks for the article. I don’t know if it is a matter of Google doing anything wrong or Bing doing anything right. I submit a baser reason for the growing reception of Bing. Often times people look for something new, novel, an alternative to the established even if success suffers from feeling old and outdated. I’m reminded of a
“Simpsons” episode where Lisa tried to explain to the creators of one of their favorite cartoons (“Itchy and Scratchy”) is losing its luster. Lisa points out that there was nothing wrong with the show to begin with; rather, the characters had simply lost the impact they once had with their audience.