Bing to Power Yahoo! Search Starting This Week

In case you had missed the news or weren’t aware, as of this week Bing has started powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada. With this transition, Bing will move from a small competitor to Google to a significant competitor and possibly even a slight threat. Google still dominates with over 60% share of search, but Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo will now power more than 5 billion monthly searches (around 32% share of search in the US). As a search marketer, this is a significant change from what we have been used to and it offers a strong opportunity.

From a pharmaceutical SEO standpoint, Google and Bing both have a very strong commitment to improving the quality of search results for health-related queries performed on a monthly basis. Health-related searches are estimated to be around 4 billion monthly queries (25% of all searches), so this commitment from search giants is very reasonable and expected. For pharma brands, this means that if you aren’t focusing on search engine marketing via SEO or PPC (the two primary sub-channels of search marketing) then you are missing out on a significant opportunity. Users driven from search engines are typically a highly engaged user because they have entered key phrases which are considered highly relevant to the content on your page. If a pharmaceutical website – either branded or unbranded – has high quality content that truly is related to the search user’s intent, then the level of engagement will be high.

The long and short of this story is that website owners should be watching for any changes in their search behavior in the coming days and weeks. Bing will now be powering Yahoo search, which could have a positive or negative impact depending on how performance was previously. If you were ranking better on Yahoo than Bing, this could be a less than positive impact, while if you were ranking better on Bing this could be happy news. Either way, this now means that optimizing only for Google from this point on could be a big mistake. Your search marketing agency should be planning for how they can improve your search visibility in Bing in addition to Google as these 2 search engines now power over 95% of all search volume.

Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.