Microsoft Bing grows quickly, small businesses advised to act

Microsoft’s new search engine, ‘Bing’, is just five weeks old, but has already recorded over two million unique browsers in a result that could foreshadow a future as a market player.

The figures are nowhere near Google’s or Yahoo!7’s, but some SEO experts say businesses should start to consider how their websites are taking advantage of Microsoft’s new site.

According to new figures from Nielsen, Bing has recorded 2.35 million unique browsers in Australia since its launch on June 3. Google recorded 9.52 million unique browsers, up from 9.1 million in May and 8.9 million in April.

Yahoo!7 recorded 3.37 million unique browsers in June, up from 3.23 million in May and 3.13 million in April. But Bing’s market share may be set to increase, with Ninemsn expected to introduce print advertisements for Bing in magazines starting from next month.

It will be difficult for Bing to compete with Google, which currently accounts for 90% of Australian searches and holds 94% of the $800 million search advertising market. Before Bing was launched, Ninemsn accounted for less than 5% of all searches made in Australia.

SEO expert Jim Stewart, who operates search engine marketing firm Stewart Media, says it is important for businesses to realise how they can use Bing to their advantage.

“I have arguments with other people in the industry about Ninemsn and Bing. In our experience and the figures we see, we think that Live, Ninemsn and Bing have always been number two in Australia.”

“Australian businesses, therefore, need to be quite aware of Bing. It has a whole suite of web-master tools, which Windows Live never used to have. It can tell you things about your site that you didn’t have before, and it’s always good to have a different point of view.”

Stewart says that marketing managers in any businesses should become familiar with how to use Bing, and that it could increase in popularity over the next few months.

“Talk to whoever is doing your online marketing and web development, and they should be getting Bing web master tools up for themselves to cross-check with Google analytics, just to cover as many bases as possible. After all, I welcome more competition in the search engine business.”

Jasmine Batra, founder of Arrow Internet Marketing, also says businesses need to start becoming more familiar with Bing and how it works.

“The spending which Microsoft has used on Bing shows they are serious. Uptake has been good, which shows it’s gone beyond the novelty factor of just a new website. People are coming back to it, and it has cleared that test.”

“People need to start taking this more seriously, and see how higher they rank on Bing. It does defer from Google in terms of how you rank, but it’s something businesses should still watch to simply compare. While you are working on Google keywords and things, you should watch Bing to see how you’re ranking at the same time with those keywords.”

David Markus, founder of IT services company Combo, says businesses shouldn’t devote their entire marketing budget to Bing just yet, but suggests they keep a watchful eye open.

“Given the small number of visits, you wouldn’t want to spend millions of dollars on Bing but you want to keep an eye out. When and if Bing gets to the point where it challenges Google, you want to be in on the action.”

“Then again, if Bing proves to be the wrong path and you’ve spent a lot of money on it, you get absolutely no return on investment. You have to be careful with how you go about dealing with it.”

Some still have their doubts. Nick Bell, managing director of WebMarketingExperts, says it will be difficult for Ninemsn and Bing to compete with Google.

“We still don’t really focus on Bing, it’s probably the last one on our list of engines we work with. It just hasn’t got the volume of Google, but it might catch up given enough time.”

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt also seemed to dismiss the Bing search engine last month, saying it would be too difficult for Microsoft to emulate Google’s success.

“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft,” he said. “They do this about once a year. From Bing’s perspective, they have a bunch of new ideas and there are some things that are missing.”

“We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for them to copy that.”