Read More

Nearly everything which is written about SEO is about the Google search engine, and that’s hardly surprising. Worldwide, Google accounts for around 87% of the search market, with Microsoft’s search engine Bing well behind at just under 7%. With Google dominating the market, it’s easy to see why companies direct their efforts into optimising websites for Google. Although Bing’s market share might not sound like much, when you consider the sheer volume of people who are online can you really afford to discount 7% of your potential customers?

Is Bing Better than Google?

The two search engines basically do the same thing – help users find what they are looking for online. There are some differences though which website owners should be aware of. Both use automatic software called crawlers to look at pages on the internet and index them for users. Google has extended its brand over the years, and expanded into offering services such as Gmail and their Chrome web browser and the brand has purchased other sites like YouTube. Microsoft has partner services too, offering email through Outlook and a OneDrive storage service.

Tools for Website Owners

Both Bing and Google offer ways for website owners to get lots of information about the people who are visiting their websites. Keyword research tools will help identify trends and possible terms which you are missing and which could be incorporated into your SEO strategy. Microsoft Bing will also allow you to import data from your console over on the Google platform.

Bing also offers SEO reports from their portal, giving concrete recommendations about what you can do with your website on a page-level basis to try to improve rankings. These twice-weekly reports are a valuable tool for web masters to prioritise their efforts. Try not to get bogged down in the details though; take a wide view of the performance of your site and only dig deeper into the figures when you’ve identified an issue.

Video and Map Content

One of the areas of search where Bing outranks Google is in video searches, as the results are presented in a more visual manner, rather than Google’s list of small thumbnails. Bing integrates searches for current films with details about where you can watch the movie, and cast and production details too. Both search engines also offer mapping in their search results allowing people to find local businesses easily.

So What’s Better – Google or Bing?

If resources are limited, it makes sense to concentrate on ensuring your site is ranking well on Google. If you’re happy with your Google ranking, then take a look at your Bing ranking too to see if there are any improvements you can quickly make. The techniques for optimising are similar for both search engines. Bing however looks also at links to social media sites, whereas Microsoft will concentrate on authoritative, authentic content and links to and from other respected websites. Bing is rapidly upping its game to provide more competition to Google, and does appears to be gaining market share.