When creating webpages that will land you on the first page of search engine results, there is no denying that Google is the most important group to please. Google dominates the mobile search market share, and among desktop users in the U.S., captures roughly 64% of search engine traffic. But that leaves a third of desktop web traffic on the table, and nearly all of it belongs to Bing*.
Bing and Yahoo, which uses Bing’s search algorithm, total roughly 34% of U.S. desktop web searches. Would you ignore a third of the customers who come into your business? Of course not! So if you are wondering how you can optimize your website to attract not only Google-users, but Bing-users as well, keep these tips in mind.
1. Google excels with text-based content, and thanks to semantic search can send users to pages featuring relevant content based on synonyms of search terms and context clues. Natural-sounding language scores the best. It can’t, however, read Flash sites. Bing prefers exact keywords but excels with rich media. It’s very skilled at reading images, video, and flash media thanks to its advanced entity understanding. Sites with rich media will score higher.
2. Google doesn’t consider domain age when determining page rank**, while Bing prefers established sites. Both give preference to “.gov”, “.edu”, and “.org” domains.
3. In double-meaning searches, Google prefers the most popular results, while Bing prefers the most localized results.
4. Google has called backlinks a top three ranking signal. Bing also uses backlinks to determine page rank, but it values pages with social authority far more than Google does.
5. Google tends to index all pages, while Bing only indexes the pages on your site with the most authority and value. It makes that assessment on the first 100kb of the page, so keep important information near the top.
Some factors remain the same between the two different search engines. For both, the most important thing you can do to get your website on the first page of search results is to offer high-quality, relevant content and to avoid black hat tactics like “spammy” backlinks.
Contact the team at Aronson Advertising to learn how we can improve your site’s ranking, no matter which search engine your customers use. The digital advertising branch of our agency offers SEO, social media, and paid search services, among others. We’d love to show you the difference we can make for your website.
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-search-engines-in-the-united-states/
**https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/852131131889790976
