You’ve probably seen the commercials, but in case you weren’t paying attention you ought to know about Bing. Bing is a search engine designed by MicroSoft and is the biggest competitor to Google in terms of search. Bing actually merged with Yahoo’s search awhile back as well making Bing a major player in the search engine space. While they are still a distant second to Google, a recent interview with a Bing representative on SEOmoz unveils a whole lot of reasons why any business, including small businesses, should not only be aware of Bing, but should start to take advantage of it.

Here are a few VERY interesting stats given in the interview:

  • Bing has 69 million searches that ONLY search on Bing, not Google!
  • These users have  a 4% higher spend rate
  • Bing’s searchers are 23% more likely to make an online purchase
  • Overall, Bing has 30%+ Market share in search

And here are some of the things that got me excited about what Bing is doing in terms of tools and/or information available to website owners:

  • You can actually talk to Duane Forrester (a Bing representative) who says that they 1) want our feedback and 2) actually take it into account in their tool creation (the link is to his twitter)
  • They seem to have an honest interest in providing web masters with the data they need to find out how to help their rankings whereas Google is notorious for hiding this type of information
  • Bing is going for “more relevance” in search but “less creepy” which I love, because Google is getting kinda creepy (and so is Facebook by the way)

So what does this mean for small businesses? It’s simple really, it means that if you are not paying attention to Bing, you could be missing out on over 30% of the potential business that clicks more and spends more than those in the 70% group! So what should you do about this?

  1. Go to Bing Local and set up your business with a profile
  2. Set up your website in Bing’s Webmaster Tools and add your site (don’t worry it’s easy)
  3. Sit back and wait for the data to come in so you can evaluate how your site is doing!