Depending on the nature of your business or organisation and whether it trades in goods and services, membership or followers and likes, the most viable source of potential “recruits” will vary. For e-commerce businesses in the UK and increasingly Internationally, Google is the main source of traffic relating to potential customers and sales. After all, they account for two-thirds of global advertising revenue and are almost fifteen times larger than all the billings of the world’s largest advertising agency group, WPP.

So, Google is more than a big hitter. But you may be wondering about their online search rivals, too.

By comparison, the next largest competitor in most markets is Microsoft-owned Bing, which is now officially supposed to be known as Microsoft Bing. Quite why they’d want to be so closely associated with a business that is around 3% the size of Google’s advertising business is anybody’s guess, but that’s still an $8bn company; I wouldn’t turn it down.

You would reasonably think from these figures that Google must be the premium player and that using their network (for paid adverts) will deliver a poorer ROI than struggling Bing, which must surely offer better prices to try and gain market share.

In our experience, you’d be wrong to think that. Whilst SEO (attracting free visitors from the search engine traffic) is primarily what we are about, as you’d expect, we also run small test paid search campaigns – the main reason is to identify any changing link between paid results influencing free ones. NB. In case you are wondering, the search engines claim there is NO link between how you perform in the free SEO results and whether or not you advertise at all or increase or decrease your paid advert budget – but again, I’d have to kill you if I tell you everything we’ve deduced, let’s just say it’s surprising in more ways than one!

Anyway, back to the plot. You’d expect better pricing from Bing?

In our tests, paying for traffic via Bing instead of Google will cost almost twice as much to attract the same number of potential viewers – let’s call that the OTS, Opportunity To See in real-world advertising parlance. But what about the cost per click, you’ve probably also heard the old anecdotes that Microsoft traffic is cheaper? Well, we’ve found in our limited tests that the Cost Per Click (i.e. click through to your or our website) could be almost 300% higher than a comparable click from Google. We were flabbergasted.

Now, I’m no great lover of Google, so please don’t think I’m on a commission to sell them. I wouldn’t run an SEO agency if that were the case, as we are, in many respects, their rivals, but I’m certainly surprised by the numbers and the magnitude of the difference.

We’ve tried to get our heads around why and have concluded it must be a commercial decision by Bing, sorry, Microsoft Bing, to boost revenues. Their share of search volume is, we believe, only very slightly down on the year (but maybe down as much as 10% on their normal New Year peak), but revenues are up slightly – a firming of prices would account for this. It’s what we’d expect from Microsoft, who are past masters at managing money.

Does this mean you should ignore Bing? No, of course not. Any opportunity to find an audience is worth exploring, and even with reduced numbers, Bing drives billions of potential visitors per year—it’s just not as many as Google. For some businesses, the user profile of Bing loyalists may mean higher potential. Older customers are happy to trust the default search settings recommended when they first acquire their desktop computers.

There is one other important thing to say about Bing, and now I’m switching to attracting a free audience by having a well-optimised website.

In the past, each of the major search engines worked in different ways, and it was recommended that a strategy be applied to Google indexing and another for engines such as Bing and Yahoo. Nowadays, all the search engines seem to have largely followed Google’s example. It is sufficient to build a good website with good content and optimise it for Google. If you can make them happy, the other engines will generally be happy, too, and your prominence everywhere will grow.

This, of course, is where a good SEO agency comes in handy, and luckily, I know just where to find one with over a decade of experience and never a client penalised or held back!

Stuart Haining
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