Online Strategies Magazine

October 2009 – Cover Story: Bing: A Search Game-Changer?

By all accounts, Bing is gaining traction, a trend which will only grow as the engine is integrated as Yahoo’s search service. What are the implications for your SEO and SEM efforts and the search landscape overall?

By Mark Simon

In June of 2009, Microsoft–after many months of development–launched Bing, a search engine (or, as Microsoft prefers to refer to it, a “decision engine”) backed up by a $100-million mass-media marketing campaign designed to promote awareness. Less than two months later, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year joint partnership calling for Bing to provide search services for Yahoo.

While Google remains the dominant search engine, commanding some 65 percent of the search market in the U.S., Bing’s share is poised to grow from 8 percent to 30 percent once Yahoo switches from its own service to Bing. While this is not going to happen tomorrow (the deal must still get regulatory approval, and full integration may take up to two years), there’s little doubt that Bing should be taken seriously by any marketer engaged in conducting search campaigns, both paid and organic.

What Makes Bing Different
Like Google and other modern search engines, Bing is algorithmically driven. Multiple factors serve as inputs to all search engine algorithms in the results-selection process, including page popularity, content freshness, keyword density and other proprietary variables. Bing’s approach to algorithmic search appears to be similar to Google’s, although some anecdotal evidence suggests that Bing may weigh factors such as the presence of keywords within domains (URLs) more heavily than Google, while discounting page freshness.

Where Bing departs significantly from the other engines–including Google–is in the way it presents results on its search engine results pages (SERPs) (see screen grab). Microsoft calls Bing’s presentation “multi-threaded,” which means that, for many queries, instead of presenting a single stack of results ranked from top to bottom in order of relevance, Bing presents a categorized experience. For example, after searching Bing using the keywords “power supplies,” users–after being greeted with the usual stack of paid/sponsored results running at the top of the page and along the right rail–are shown results organized by category (“All Results,” “Videos,” “Images” and “Shopping”).

These categories are replicated in the upper left-hand corner of the page, in what Microsoft calls an “Explore Pane.” Each is context-sensitive. For example, a search for “Madonna” will produce a group of categories and an Explore Pane appropriate for a musical artist (“News,” “Songs,” “Downloads,” “Wallpaper”) whereas a search for “Xbox” will produce categories and an Explore Pane appropriate for a hardware device (“Shopping,” “Repair,” “Games,” “Accessories”). In effect, Bing combines the human-curated experience familiar to users of online directories with the algorithm-driven results of automated search engines.

Beyond categorized results, Bing also provides a set of previewing functions designed to give users a taste of what will appear after they click on a given listing. Hovering one’s mouse over an organic listing causes a floating box to appear containing a snippet of text drawn from the associated landing page. Rolling one’s mouse over a video thumbnail causes the video to begin playing in a short loop. Additionally, Bing includes a “Related Searches” feature in the left-hand area of its SERPs, designed to guide users to content they might not have initially associated with their queries, plus a “Search History” function designed to allow users to easily retrace their steps.

Organic Optimization Ramifications
While the fact that Bing’s algorithm appears to reward certain factors more heavily than Google’s is of fervid interest to SEO practitioners, there is little evidence to suggest that a marketer’s organic optimization strategy needs to be changed significantly to cater to Bing. Rather, the same methods used to obtain satisfactory organic rankings–including producing and maintaining relevant, up-to-date, accessible content, producing descriptive meta/title information and acquiring authoritative backlinks–apply both to Bing and the other engines. So the same general set of SEO best practices that work to achieve visibility in Google should work for Bing as well.

Still, several of Bing’s features may lead savvy webmasters to revise their optimization strategies and tactics. For example, because Bing’s categorized results tend to have fewer entries per category, competition for inclusion among them will be more intense. However, there are more categories per query, so the opportunity for inclusion in any one of these categories increases.

Bing’s previewing function provides both a threat and an opportunity. Because it appears that the text populating the “preview box” is drawn not from meta tag descriptors but from the actual page itself (or, in cases where this data is missing, from external sources), some webmasters may be unpleasantly surprised by the text that Bing decides to extract. For example, a merchant which has decided to put a cute, irreverent quiz on its homepage may find that Bing extracts this text in lieu of the formal mission statement contained either in its title or meta page sections. If this is the case, Bing provides a way for webmasters to disable Bing’s document previewing function by including the following string on pages on which they wish to defeat it: <meta name=”msnbot’, content=”nopreview”>

According to Microsoft, Bing is better able to extract meaningful information from Flash-based websites than its predecessor, which is a welcome development for merchants who rely on this technology. Additionally, Microsoft claims that Bing can intelligently “fill in data” from sites where information is sorely lacking:

When titles and/or meta descriptions don’t exist on an HTML page, Bing creates a best-effort caption from relevant external sources of reliable information to populate the caption with meaningful data for the searcher. Bing…can even construct captions from external, authoritative websites to help create basic captions where no publisher data exists.

It’s great that Bing is employing this kind of advanced extraction technology, but marketers must make sure no errors are being produced in the process. If an error is found, direct contact with the Bing team will be necessary to correct them.

Bing’s “multi-threaded” SERP with document preview, video preview, explore pane, related searches and search history

Lastly, Bing’s ability to provide a looping preview of video assets may be of interest to marketers using video to promote their wares, because they effectively “come alive” on Bing’s SERPs and are frequently mixed in with organic paid results.

PPC Ramifications
Most PPC marketers who have used Microsoft’s AdCenter to run campaigns through Microsoft’s pre-Bing “Live Search” properties will be able to easily move over to Bing, because AdCenter will be doing the ad serving and the task of porting campaigns between Google and AdCenter has–hopefully–become a matter of routine by now.

PPC marketers will naturally want to know about the kind of click-through rates, conversion rates and ROI/ROAS they can expect on Bing, but this kind of data remains anecdotal at this early stage of the game. An initial eye-tracking study comparing the behavior of users on Bing and Google found that Bing users tended to pay more attention to paid listings than on Google, and spent considerable time scanning Bing’s “Related Searches,” but this study used a pool of participants too small to qualify as a scientific sampling.

Microsoft has published a glowing case study involving BuyerZone.com. in which this vendor claims to have experienced conversion rates on Bing up to 35 percent higher than those experienced on other engines, but it is questionable whether this is a typical or best case. However, additional anecdotal reports of enhanced conversion rates on Bing continue to emerge.

What about Microsoft’s CashBack service, which was launched several years ago, but will now likely gain increased traction due to its prominent inclusion within Bing? According to Microsoft, which conducted a test with eBay over the 2008 holiday season, ads including the “CashBack” icon boasted impressive improvements in CTR (100 percent), conversion rates (30 percent) and order size (35 percent). These results are, of course, highly compelling, but there is no guarantee that other vendors will see these kinds of campaign improvements as a result of their participation in CashBack.

For the moment then, it appears that it may be some time before a definitive large-scale study can be performed comparing campaign performance on Bing versus Google, which means that marketers will have to make their own decisions as to whether it is worthwhile to participate in Bing’s marketplace. At the same time, the temporary paucity of authoritative performance data should not deter ambitious marketers seeking to take advantage of a marketplace which may offer bargains due to it being far less competitive than Google’s. And in light of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, which will naturally expand both Bing’s user and advertiser bases, investing time and resources to get up to speed is a step which will likely lead to dividends in the future.

Implications For The Search Ecosystem
Bing’s launch, plus its announced role as the search technology powering Yahoo, is likely to be welcomed by marketers for several reasons. The planned consolidation of what has heretofore been three discrete search advertising systems–each with its own rules and wrinkles–into two will make it easier for marketers to conduct cross-engine campaigns, minimizing HR expenses and moving the search industry toward a process of standardization of the search engine-delivered text ad.

More importantly, Bing’s represents a credible effort by a bona fide technology powerhouse to restore some semblance of parity to a marketplace in which Google’s influence has been growing unchallenged for some time. With more robust competition, the search ecosystem is likely to continue to produce the kinds of innovations that have made it such an effective platform for advertisers in the past, so Bing’s arrival is good news for all who welcome positive change.