Bitesize blog: Should I care about Bing?

If you’re new to search marketing, you might not remember the classic Google vs Bing discussion that questioned whether Microsoft’s search engine would ever topple Google as the king of search. These conversations don’t really happen anymore and you might be wondering whether Bing deserves a place in your SEO or PPC strategy. We firmly believe the answer is ‘yes’ as we explain in today’s bitesize blog.

Five reasons to care about Bing advertising in 2019

1. There are 137 million unique searches per month taking place on Bing (source) which is roughly 137 million potential leads you don’t want to ignore.
2. 66 million of those unique searches are from people you can’t reach on Google (source) and this should be reason enough alone.
3. Bing’s smaller market share means it’s less competitive and this makes it easier to see result from your SEO and PPC strategies.
4. Bing Ads is 60% cheaper than Google Ads with average CPCs of $7.99 compared to $20.08 on Google Ads (source)
5. Bing serves two of the top four voice assistants including Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana.

That last point is particularly interesting in 2019 as voice search becomes increasingly important. One of the biggest challenges facing search marketing specialists is optimising for voice technology and we’ve talked about using featured snippets in Google as a key strategy for this. However, Bing is pulling way ahead of Google when it comes to voice tech implementation, which should be a major point of attraction for search marketing specialists in 2019.

Besides that, don’t let Google’s insane user numbers make you think Bing’s 137 million unique searches is anything to turn your nose up at. That’s still a huge audience to work with, even by today’s standards and this, combined with Bing Ads’ (now Microsoft Ads) significantly lower CPCs, means the world’s second favourite search engine should be a part of your plans.