Google’s Market Share Drops as Bing’s Continues to Rise
Google is being challenged by Bing
In a ranking report from April of this year, Google’s market share had fallen from 67.1% in March to 66.5% in April. At the same time, Bing’s share rose from 16.9% to 17.1%. These might seem like tiny percentages to us, but for these search giants they represent millions of search queries changing hands.
Google is losing market share slowly but surely. People are realizing that there are other search engines out there and other ways to find what they’re looking for, expanding the idea of search while also diversifying their web usage.
What this means for your business
All of this talk of percentages is great, but what does it have to do with your business?
What these changes in the market shares of search engines mean is that your business needs to be sure that it is adopting an attitude of compromise when it comes to SEO.
Your business should not be using an SEO strategy that only focuses on one search engine as this could be disastrous for your traffic should search markets continue to shift in the direction they are currently headed. Many businesses are focusing their SEO efforts exclusively on Google, and while this is certainly not going to harm their Google traffic, what about the traffic coming from the other 30 – 40% of the web? What will happen to traffic coming from these other sources?
The point we’re trying to make is that there is more than one set of webmaster guidelines out there. Each major search engine has their own, and the smaller search engines tend to follow the examples of their larger competitors. So there are at least 2 – 3 different sets of “rules” out there that govern how well your website ranks in a given search engine. Google and Bing each have their own guidelines, webmaster tool sets, and keyword-driven advertising programs.
Your takeaway
Your goal should be to keep your options open while keeping your overall compliance high. Do your best to find the happy medium between the guidelines of Google and Bing and to appeal to both search engines as sources of traffic for your website. If you are interested in learning where your traffic comes from there are a variety of third-party tools available that can help you analyse and determine the nature of your website’s traffic without influence from either search engine.
