It’s no secret that Google dominates SEO conversations. You don’t Bing anything, you Google it. With Google as the forefront of search engines, it begs the question, is Bing still relevant?
The short answer is that, yes, Bing is still relevant. If Google and Bing were competing in the Olympics, Google would win the Gold every time. Bing, while not the powerhouse that Google is, would still qualify for a silver medal.
While Bing is still a distant second to Google, it is important to keep an eye on its growth. Bing gives businesses an alternative to Google as well as another platform for them to grow their visibility. With Bing working on many improvements that might help business in their optimization efforts, let’s take a look at some of the enhancements Bing has been working on.
Bing Search
Just like Google, Bing has been improving and encouraging discovery beyond top-level search results. Meaning they are improving the way search results look and feel. More importantly, they are trying to provide a more meaningful experience. While it is not the intimate and intuitive search landscape Google has, they are working to improve it.
Bing recently enhanced search with an announcement of the Bing Entity Search API:
Bing Entity Search API brings rich contextual information about people, places, things, and local businesses to any application, blog, or website for a more engaging user experience. With Bing Entity Search, you can identify the most relevant entity results based on the search term and provide users with primary details about those entities. With our latest coverage improvements, we now support multiple international markets and many more entity types such as famous people, places, movies, TV shows, video games, and books. With this new API, developers can enhance their apps by exposing rich data from the Bing Knowledge Graph directly in their apps.
The enhanced Bing knowledge graph is similar, but not quite as robust as Google. Still, it means that your website should be optimized to have refreshing and relevant content to compete in the SERPs.
Visual Content
Bing has been known for having a visually appealing layout, but they’ve taken it a step further when it comes to videos. Bing presents a clean and eye-catching thumbnail panel that is easy to explore and click on.
In contrast to Google, it seemsold-fashionedd and less visually appealing. This is one area that Bing has an edge on Google. Bing understands that people want to see a more visual result, which drives more clicks.
What do all of these enhancements mean for Marketers?
We always recommend having a top-notch solid SEO foundation, regardless of which search engine you are optimizing for. Google is the clear cut winner with the amount of market share that it receives on a daily basis. However, we think it is important to keep an eye on Bing. With their strengthened search functions and overall improvement to their search experience, we are starting to see more businesses with SEO optimization strategies on both Bing and Google. Having Bing as a part of a business’s powerful toolkit could mean more opportunities to show up in search, which equates to more customers.