While Google is Important, You Can't Forget Bing!
This article comes from personal experience. Google controls 68.75% of the search engine marketplace so it's without a doubt that I put majority of my efforts into Google and working in Google Webmaster Tools and sort of neglected Bing and their Bing Webmaster Tools offering. For some time my main focus was on Google and I neglected Bing, well a year went by and the YOY data in Google Analytics came back and I was driving about 75% less traffic from Bing than the year before, it really added up.
What I did next was put in nearly an equal amount of effort into Bing that I did with Google and I've really started to see the results because I'm nearly back to 2013 levels in traffic from Bing. With that said, it's still not Google numbers but again, it adds up and I'm not one to pass up on any free traffic.
While Google Is Important, You Can't Forget Bing
With the introduction of Cortana, the voice activated assistant on Windows phones, websites are going to have to start incorporating SEO for more search engines than Google. If you have been focusing solely on what you thought would rank best with the king of search engines, you may find that your website may start getting less views as more people use their mobile devices to search for the information they want.
Cortana, The New Voice of Smartphones
While most smartphone users are used to the likes of Siri, Microsoft has come out with their version that is sweeping the technological world. "She" is responsive, gets to know the user's likes and dislikes the more they use the phone, and becomes more intuitive with time. Each new search is marked down in the memory of Cortana, so that the next time a similar question or search comes up, the answers that were given the first time around are figured in.
In the video below, see how Cortana outsmarts Siri.
It's Time To Start Optimizing For Bing
The problem for those that have neglected to SEO their website for Bing search is that Cortana is based on the results that come up from Bing. This can become a big problem if the website has only been working up their results from Google. Bing is similar in stature to early Google, in that it only looks over the first 100K of cache for each site when ranking. This means, if all of your important information is in the back of your website, Bing is not as likely to bring your website up when someone is searching for your niche through a voice activated assistant.
If your website has not been taking Bing into consideration, then you need to re-evaluate what type of SEO your site has from the landing page all the way through to the deeper pages of your website. This way, you can get the ranking you want, and your customers are hoping for, on both search engines, no matter what virtual assistant their smartphone offers them.
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