When Bing is More Important than Google

Sure, Google may account for 70% of all search traffic, but that doesn’t mean it’s that high for your client and their target market. There are times when the search engine of choice for your customers will be Bing.A client asked if it would be worth investing time and focusing efforts on increasing their Bing search results. After a little time in Analytics, I thought the answer was, without a doubt, YES!????

The target demographic for this client was older people, 45 years of age and above. Based on ComScore’s survey from 2007, older demographics tend to use Internet Explorer. We decided to look at the analytics and see what we could find.
After looking at Analytics, we saw that a majority of their site’s visitors (over 58%) used Internet Explorer.

 Internet Explorer’s default search bar obviously employs Bing
The question is, does their organic traffic line up as well? ??

 The combined traffic from Yahoo and Bing is 8438. That is roughly 36% of the organic traffic to the site which is a little higher than average.
However, when we look at the organic rankings of this client, we can see that the average rankings for Bing are a lot lower than the average in Google.
Out of the 36 targeted keywords for this site, the average ranking in Google is position 11. In Bing the average position of the targeted keywords is 29. How much more traffic could the site receive by focusing a little more effort on the Bing side of search?
??After looking at other clients who target older demographics I found this trend was fairly consistent. 50-60% of their traffic used Internet Explorer. Yahoo and Bing organic traffic accounted for as much as 55% of their organic traffic, and Bing rankings were, on average, 20 positions behind.
??Though Google may be our focus for a majority of our work, there are times, and clients that need to have Bing as a more central part of their SEO strategy.