Microsoft’s BING search engine may cause a radical shift for real estate website SEO strategies. In the recent WAV Group report on Broker Website Effectiveness, Google was responsible for 64% of of search engine traffic. All other search engines (including Microsoft) were responsible for 19%. As a result, SEO specialists have focused their optimization efforts on Google as the primary search engine for their strategy.
Today, in a report from web traffic measurement agency ComScore, Bing is now responsible for 16.7% of search. This total is up from 11% when BING launched June second. This is a remarkable shift in such a short period of time.Proper SEO strategies are tuned to meet the indexing standards and algorithms of specific search engines. This shift will require website strategies to change to give more weighting to optimize for BING as they continue to grab market share.
“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, ComScore SVP. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”
The New York Post reported that Bings early success has “rattled” Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is said to be leading a team of top engineers in a quest to discover how Bings algorithm works and to complete performance upgrades to the Google system.
If you are under contract with an SEO service provider, be sure to discuss the BING impact at your next progress meeting.
