A lot is made of Google’s dominance in the search engine market, but is Google the one-stop search engine marketing stop of the age? Until last year, there were two pretenders to the search engine crown – Yahoo! and Bing. Now there is just Bing, but backed by Microsoft Bing represents a true challenger to the financial and SE dominance of the Big G.

From a marketers point of view, why bother to promote yourself on Bing when Google dominates the scene?

Firstly, the global numbers are hiding some important differences between the two companies. Google may dominate global search rankings, but 34% of its traffic comes from overseas, whereas Bing is a very US-centric in its users. What this means is that for sites needing US traffic, the playing field is more level than the global statistics would have you believe.

Secondly, while Google may have a good chunk of traffic from overseas users, there are still some major anomalies. Google has been doing well in Brazil and India – both emerging economies – but after severe difficulties in China, mainly dealing with privacy and censorship issues, Google quit. On the other hand, the second largest market for Bing happens to be China. What this means for website managers is that unless you are interested in performing a very granular analysis of site traffic and cross-comparing to the respective search engine source, there is nothing to be gained by preferring Google over Bing, or vice versa.

Thirdly, traffic is not what counts. Conversion rates are what are needed to maintain corporate sanity and profitability. This should be ringing sympathetic bells for anyone with basic sales training. The first issue is to target prospects, the second is to qualify them – in both instances you are looking for people with the MAN – the Means, Authority and Need. The Means is of course money. Bing enjoys an older demographic than Google; a Bing user is more likely to be over 35, especially very likely to be over 55 years, to have children and a higher income. In short, Bing users are more likely to have income compared to a Google user, but Google counters this with sheer numbers of users.

In general terms, you cannot focus on Bing and ignore Google, or vice versa because you are effectively blinding yourself to half the market. This is why Rankpay advises clients to utilize both search engines in their marketing strategies, and certainly in the initial stages when you are trying to determine where the most valuable traffic is coming from.

Takeaway

Google does not have everything its own way in search engine land.

Bing may have a smaller slice of the overall market, but it brings valuable advantages to the table.

Bing users are more likely to convert into sales. Bing users are more likely to have an income and are more likely to be from the United States than overseas. Bing and Google also compete overseas, and in some instances Bing dominates.

Both Google and Bing have massive traffic flows across the entire spectrum of users. You must not ignore one and focus on the other; this would be like stopping half of your customers from walking into your physical store.

]]> http://blog.rankpay.com/bing-v-google-why-do-you-need-both/feed/ 0 http://blog.rankpay.com/does-a-keywords-seo-opportunity-relate-to-pricing-can-i-you-just-get-my-site-ranked-in-google/ http://blog.rankpay.com/does-a-keywords-seo-opportunity-relate-to-pricing-can-i-you-just-get-my-site-ranked-in-google/#comments Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:57:22 +0000 admin http://blog.rankpay.com/does-a-keywords-seo-opportunity-relate-to-pricing-can-i-you-just-get-my-site-ranked-in-google/ Today, someone posted this question (slightly paraphrased):

I am seriously thinking about signing up for SEO with your company. My web designer recommended you. However, I have some questions… Firstly, for my first keyword I entered, the SEO Opportunity states “poor” however the monthly search volume is 9544 on the keyword and for a “top 3″ ranking the cost is $110/month. However, for my second keyword the SEO Opp is “good” and the keyword has 1393 for the monthly search volume for a price of $79/mnth. I’m wondering why, if we are paying to be in the top three – and paying more for the first option – why the SEO opp is “poor”. Surely the higher the search volume, the better – why is the price is higher??

Second question: What exactly does “top three” mean?? We are looking at Google only. Does that mean for one month each and every time someone does a Google search and enters the key words we pick we will come up on the first page in one of the top three spots?? How do you have control of this – there are many SEO companies out there and what if 10 other companies are all telling their clients the same thing – that means there are only three spots for 10 companies. Please can you explain exactly what the ‘top three” means? Thank you.

Hi Denise -

The answer to your first question is that pricing is actually based upon the existing competition and the existing seo “strength” of your Website. Pricing is not directly related to the keyword’s SEO Opportunity. In other words, if there are a lot of Websites with strong seo strength and your site has a lower strength (often due to being a new site or having a low Google PageRank) than the pricing will be higher. This is because it takes us a lot more work, time and effort to get sites with a lower seo strength ranked high in the search engines.

As for your second set of questions: We can’t only rank your site for Google. We use an optimization practice that targets all of the major search engines. Sometimes you’ll rank in all three and sometimes you won’t. The good thing is, if you don’t rank in a particular search engine, you won’t pay anything. And the pricing for Yahoo and MSN is at a lower price since they tend to drive less traffic. In addition, we can’t guarantee that you’re site will rank for the Ranking Goal that you choose (although most of our customers do end up achieving their ranking goals). That’s another reason we only charge you if you rank, and the amount you pay is predicated upon how high we can get you ranked . . .

I hope this information helps, and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions!

Kind Regards,

Shawn B.
RankPay Support

Credibility is often measured in how long a particular search engine has known about the page. Of course, the amount and quality of content on the page also matters. So do other factors, like how many other Websites link to your Web page.

The primary way to evaluate the overall credibility of your pages is by viewing it’s Google “PageRank”. The scale runs from 0-10 with ten being the best possible score. PageRank (aka “PR”) is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page.

Google explains PageRank this way:

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“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query. ”
——————————————–

It’s important to note that PageRank is not the only determining factor in where your page will be ranked or what the future SEO future holds for you and your Website. There are plenty of examples in which low PR pages rank high in the search engines (usually for keywords that aren’t very competitive). PageRank is just general barometer . . .

How do I view the PageRank of my pages?

You can accomplish this one of three ways:

• Login to your RankPay account and view the PR of the pages you have already assigned to keywords. Do this by clicking on the Active Keywords or Pending Keywords tabs.
• Download and install the Google Toolbar which has a Google PageRank “meter” on it. You can download the GToolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com
• You can also use a Website that has a PageRank tool like PageRank.net.

You can learn more about Google’s PageRank system by visiting the Google site at:

http://www.google.com/technology/

The rankings we use to establish pricing are based upon the more common generic results that are not personalized.

There are 8 simple tasks that you or your webmaster will have to do to prepare your webpage(s) for our SEO service. They only take about 15 minutes to complete…

We have a page that explains in detail how to do “onpage optimization” here.

Although it is not required, selecting pages that have a higher “Google PageRank” rating greatly increase our ability to get rankings for you. You can view the PageRank of your Webpages here.

You can assign up to 2 keywords per Webpage.

It’s important to keep in mind that when you cancel a keyword it is then available for another user to add to their account. If that happens, you won’t be able to add it back to your account since we only allow one customer per keyword.

You can either deactivate the keyword from within your online account or submit a trouble ticket to us requesting we deactivate the keyword for you.