Is Bing Becoming a Viable Search Engine
Posted: 2015-10-14 23:21:08
For many years Google was pretty much the one and only search engine that webmasters and SEO’s alike targeting for their campaigns. Although most if not all webmasters and SEO’s still target Google the winds are changing. At least a little bit.
If you have not been keeping up with Microsoft, then maybe now is the time to do a little research. Windows 10 was released to the public on July 29th. However, because it was a free upgrade there were many people in line to get it causing Microsoft to release it waves. Even so, to date there has been over 110 Million installs. Making Windows 10 OS the fastest Win OS to be accepted by the public and installed so rapidly.
What does this have to do with SEO? Well Windows 10 comes with a virtual assistant named Cortana. Cortana is heavily integrated within the OS. She is also heavily integrated with Bing, so much that without access to Bing a lot of her functionality is crippled. I have been using Windows 10 now for about a year and Cortana finds such good results for my searches that I have not loaded Google up for personal use for about 6 months.
Within the new browser, Edge, if you see a word you do not know or if you see a product you want to know more about just highlight the word and right click it. You will get a context menu with one of the options to ask Cortana. You got it she searched Bing.
Microsoft has been spreading their technologies to other platforms so now users can also use Cortana on IOS and Android. Thus spreading the use of Bing even further. Windows mobile may only hold about 4% share of users in the USA but in other countries it is doing quite well and with Windows 10 mobile and the new Flagship phones hitting the Market in Late November or early December that percentage is likely to rise a few more points. This means even more uses of Cortana and Bing search.
So in conclusion if you have only been trying to target Google and have given no thought to Bing as a viable search engine maybe now is the time to rethink that and give Bing, Windows 10 and Cortana a try. I am sure you will see an increase in traffic if you are not currently on Bing and get ranked on Bing. Specially as the Windows 10 mobile market prepares to launch.
