In today's online marketing news, Yahoo! search executives announced that U.S. and Canadian organic search results are now powered by Microsoft Bing. What does the Yahoo! / Bing relationship mean for small- and medium-sized businesses?
First, let's take a look at some numbers. As recently as June 2010, Yahoo! held a 7% market share in overall search volume. While Google remained in the 65% range for all search volume, Microsoft Bing's overall search market share before the Yahoo! announcement was just under 12%.
The bottom-line increase in overall search is relatively negligible, when compared to Google's daunting search presence. However, this deal underscores the fact that it will take an extremely focused and long-term effort to crack into Google's core business efforts. Have to start somewhere.
From a business perspective, this deal could provide additional leverage to obtain similar search-generated traffic using less costly approaches. For example, Bing's search results are categorized for specific topics -- be sure to write enough content to appear in Bing's secondary categorized results for major terms already 'owned' by large enterprises.
Second, using a $150 Kodak camera and basic editing software (please contact me if you want ideas), anyone can generate simple videos to introduce a product, promote an event, or even generate leads using video downloads. In my opinion, Bing serves up much more relevant videos in their search results than Google. In fact, Yahoo! will benefit from Bing's video search expertise, while Bing will benefit from Yahoo!'s image search and slideshow search functionality, which proved to be a market share driver for Yahoo! during the first half of 2010. So, if you have slides or images as part of your content, be sure to tag the images appropriately to increase the chance of driving prospects to your site organically.
I'll cover video marketing in an upcoming segment.
Comments about the Yahoo! / Bing deal? Let me know!
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