Google Vs Bing For SEO And PPC Marketing

Earlier this year it was announced that Bing search engine traffic represented 21 percent of all searches an increase driven by several factors including recent Bing partnerings.
However, Google is still the search leader, owning 64 percent of all web searches, with a strong mobile user-base.

Most search engine optimization (SEO) efforts have focused largely on optimizing for Google, ignoring Bing because of its lack of popularity, a deciding factor which is becoming more unpersuasive with each passing year.

Key differences exist between Google and Bing and ignoring either in an SEO campaign can result in lost sales opportunities and customer exposure.

In this article we discuss 5 key areas which online marketers need to consider in their Google and Bing SEO marketing campaigns.


1. Content Weighting 

Bing algorithms give more weight to certain content practices than does Google. For instance, title tags, keywords in the anchor text are ranked higher by Bing than Google.
Page authority ranking promotes older established domains over backlinks.
Unlike Google, Bing does not rank all of a website's pages. Home page content is given priority by Bing. Even further, SEO placement, especially since Bing only ranks the content in the first 100 kilobytes of the web page, makes it critical that Bing SEO efforts are concentrated early on in the web page.
Bing also ranks direct keywords higher than Google. This means that Bing targeted web page content should be focused around a keyword or group of keywords to be ranked higher by Bing SEO efforts.


2. Social Media Differences 

Google has publicly stated that social media ranking will not have an effect on their rankings of web pages. Though, this is doubted by some who have independently investigated Google's rankings where a page's ranking seems to be primarily driven by social media signals.
Overall, Bing places more emphasis on social media. Higher rankings on Bing are given to pages with high social media popularity from high quality users.


3. Images and Video Ranking 

Bing further differentiates itself from Google in its "entity understanding" technology, which allows it to interpret an image's or video's content, allowing Bing to better rank visual content. Google, still largely relies on text descriptions to provide its ranking of videos and images.


4. Local Listings 

Bing's local search results favor small businesses more so than Google. While Google's algorithm gives higher ranking to larger, older businesses, Bing's ranking gives more weight to a business' distance. The end result being Bing's local listings contain many more small local businesses than the equivalent search on Google.


5. Key Similarities Still Exist 

 Poor backlinks and other spam tactics are penalized
High quality content is rewarded
High engagement and user retention ranks higher
Site's popularity is critical to ranking
Sharing of a page's content can favorably improve page ranking

Conclusion With the announcement that Bing will power AOL's search and Apple's defaulting of Bing search engine on their smart devices and their Safari users, Bing is demonstrating its ability to replace Google in key market segments and popular devices.

An effective SEO marketing campaign should address the similarities and differences of both Bing and Google ranking algorithms to capture as large amount of traffic as possible.

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