It's been a long time since there were first rumblings of a possible search alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft, and now here we are, on the verge of seeing the first signs of all the behind-the-scenes planning carried out and implemented... are you excited? We sure are!
In the upcoming days we will begin the organic (algorithmic) transition, which means that soon Bing will begin to power the English language organic search results on Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada. Once this organic transition is complete, Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches... that's 31.6% of the search market share in the U.S. (290 million monthly searches and 8.6% share in Canada).1
Now's the time to ensure you’ve got your search engine optimization (SEO) ducks in a row; you don't want to miss out on tapping into the potential to reach those 159 million searchers that will be viewing Bing organic search results in the U.S. (15 million in Canada).1 Not only does SEO complement your PPC campaigns, it helps boost the visibility of your business too. It's a win-win situation!
If you're not already familiar with Bing webmaster tools, they can help you optimize the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. Not only that, you can improve your site's relevance within the Bing organic search results, which could help increase your customer engagement.
Get started by visiting the Bing Toolbox or watching our video.
In other news, if you currently advertise on Yahoo! Search, you will soon have the option to use a transition tool that will walk you through the steps to transition your Yahoo! campaigns into Microsoft Advertising adCenter. The transition tool is currently in testing with a small group of advertisers, and we look forward to making it available to all Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers soon.
As an existing adCenter advertiser, you may want to start optimizing your campaigns in preparation for the increased traffic coming in from the Yahoo! network. If you’re not already using them, our Learning Center has a host of useful campaign management and optimization tools available in the Downloads section. From adCenter Desktop (Beta) to Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, these tools help make updating, optimizing and maintaining your campaigns less time-consuming and more efficient.
For more information, visit the Microsoft Transition Center for the latest news about the new marketplace. If you have a Yahoo! Account Manager, they will continue to help you through the transition plan you’ve established based on your business needs.
Keep in mind that our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season. If we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may choose to defer the transition to 2011.
Thoughts? Feedback? Comments? Leave them below… we’d love to know what you’re thinking about all of this!
- comScore qSearch (custom) June 2010
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