The 8 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Ignore Bing

When most people think of search engines, Google is often the first name that comes to mind – and with good reason. Google has a healthy share of the online search market (nearly 67%), has an excellent brand, and offers a top-notch user experience. They’ve built a global brand so ubiquitous that the term “search engine” is often replaced simply with “Google”. After all, how many other brands do you know that have turned their name into a verb? Maybe you should Google it.

Our Connecticut marketing agency is familiar with these search engine generalizations. Because of Google’s large market share, our healthcare technology marketing company and others in the industry tend to focus our efforts on optimizing web pages and marketing strategies to gain high Google organic search rankings.

However, we need to remind ourselves as marketers not to ignore other search engines, especially Bing. Here are 8 reasons why you shouldn’t ignore Bing when crafting an online marketing strategy:

1. Bing continues to increase its share of the search market, eclipsing 17% for the first time in April 2013.

2. When iOS 7 is introduced this fall, Siri will be able to confer with Bing when providing search results, making Bing the “default search engine” for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

3. Bing is also the default search engine for the new Facebook Graph Search. When Facebook can’t find an answer to your query in their social network, they will display Bing search results directly inside the Facebook Graph Search. As more Facebook users adopt the new social search tool, Bing is sure to get more search traffic.

4. There has been much speculation in the industry that Apple will eventually replace Google with Bing as Safari’s default search engine. This makes Bing search results even more important, especially as the number of mobile phone searches continues to grow.

5. Bing is in the process of updating the look and feel of Bing Places to better compete with Google+ Local. As we have seen with Google, local listings have become an important part of organic search results, often taking up a significant portion of the search results page.

6. Microsoft continues to throw money at promoting Bing, a sign that they are ready and willing to compete with Google to be the top search engine.

7. Twitter and Facebook are integrated into Bing organic results. This social integration is similar to what Google has done with Google+, showing searchers results that their Google+ connections have “+1’d”. It may be argued that Bing’s social integration is more important or more useful to searchers, as adoption rates for Google+ still lag far behind social media giants Facebook and Twitter.

8. There is also value to be found in Bing’s PPC advertising platform. If you’ve spent hours and hours setting up your Google AdWords account and turning it into a fine-tuned lead generating machine, Bing makes it easy to port over your AdWords campaigns into the Bing Ads platform.