If you travel around the internet reading the various news sources related to search engines and search engine optimization, one thing is becoming clear – Bing is starting to have an impact. It’s only small. However, the old saying, ‘from little things big things grow’ could well be true when it comes to search engines.

Bing is doing well when it comes to online retail sales. No doubt we can attribute some of this to the cash back offers that have been available. Like it or not, it is helping Bing secure more business and more searchers. Add to this Bing’s efforts to include real time search and their improvements to video search, to name a few, and they are capturing little corners of the search market.

There will be a spin off effect. If someone goes to Bing to search for a video, they may well stay to conduct other searches. If Bing’s share does start to grow at the expense of Google’s share, this may cause more people to visit Bing to see why they are capturing more of the search market – of course, some may stay.

This is not going to happen overnight. We could be looking at a two to three year period and during that time Google will do everything possible to halt the bleeding of any traffic. However, things online can happen very quickly as well. If word spreads that Bing is doing a better job and taking traffic from Google, there could be a flood moving from one to the other.

What does this mean for SEO? Certainly, searchers are going to be the big winners. Search results are going to be more relevant in terms of geography and search terms used. The long term effect for SEO may be quite minute. SEO strategies for both Bing and Google are not too dissimilar and we already concentrate on areas such as geography. Where SEO may get difficult is in the area of clarity. Mid-length keyword phrases may become more important than single words.

If search engines like Google can determine a user’s search intent based on their usage patterns then single keywords will become irrelevant. Optimizing for the word ‘tire’ for example says nothing. Is it a car tire, motor bike tire or push bike tire (or truck, tractor)? If a user has been looking at push bikes then enters a search for tires, the search engine may well present the user with push bike tire results first.

Are we witnessing a new dawn in search engine dominance? I think we may be. One thing is certain, it will be an interesting show to watch.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.