Is it Worth Optimising for Yahoo or Bing?

Even seasoned marketers tend to refer to ‘Google’ as the generic search engine. Many people focus huge attention on getting to the top of Google and treat the others as also-rans. But is this attitude out-dated?

Here in the UK, Google commands a huge percentage of the overall search market. Recent figures suggest that they receive 9 out of every 10 searches. This puts them in a commanding position and, in many respects, justifies why they receive so much attention from SEO types.

But whilst they remain the safe bet and the most likely to deliver high quantities of traffic to your site, it isn’t fair to simply dismiss the likes of Yahoo, Bing and even Ask. After all, between them they do still command 10% of the search market.

How exactly can you target individual search engines though? There isn’t exactly a tick box that you fill in to say which ones you want to rank on and which you don’t.

The best way of finding out what issues could be affecting performance on the likes of Bing and Yahoo is by installing their individual Webmaster Tools software. Any site should already have Google Webmaster Tools set up to notify them of how the search engine views your site and to identify any issues; so why not use the same principle for the others.

Yahoo and Bing are soon to converge into one, with Microsoft taking over the search engine duties. So if you are short of time and resources the second search engine that you should be targeting ought to be Bing.

As a website owner or SEO expert you can’t rule out a shift in public searching habits either. For example, in recent years search has become far more mobile. It is being integrated within PDAs, tablets, laptops and mobile phones. This means that people can search on the go and could be more swayed by a default search engine rather than hunting down the one that they use by default at home.

Apple and Google are at loggerheads currently. Their tit for tat battle has led some to suggest that iPhones could permanently abandon Google as the default, passing that right onto Bing. Strangely Apple have had a much longer spat with Microsoft, but perhaps they are seen as the lesser of two evils. Anyway, all this mobility means that search habits might change and having a top ranking on the likes of Bing could be far more beneficial to you.

The bottom line in all this is that you shouldn’t simply focus all attention on Google. Give the others a cursory glance every now and then to see if there are any opportunities to improve your traffic and broaden your online visibility.