SEO Blog

Many companies rely solely on Google for their SEO and PPC campaigns due to the fact that Google dominates in generating the most search traffic.  However, with the recent merger between Yahoo! and Bing, you need to start focusing on the new Microsoft-Yahoo! Search Alliance (the new name of the partnership), as it may now account for close to 30% of search traffic (according to comScore). 

There will be several implications of this new partnership in both SEO and PPC.  Once the transition is complete, it will be Bing search on Yahoo’s domain.  Therefore, your rankings with Bing will now become your rankings on Yahoo!.  If you currently rank well in Yahoo! and not so well in Bing, it would be wise to take quick action to optimize your keywords by Bing standards so that your campaign does not suffer.

For PPC, your campaign will also be affected.  Once the transition is complete, all advertisers will need to use Microsoft adCenter to manage their ads.  You will need to either integrate your Yahoo! account into your existing Microsoft adCenter, or create a new account.  AdCenter treats ad copy length and keyword mapping differently than Yahoo!, so if you have a Yahoo! account then you will need to make changes.  Both ad copy title length and description length have fewer characters, so if you don’t make changes soon, the ads may read incorrectly once the transition occurs.  In addition, while Yahoo! maps keywords with variations, Bing does not.  So you will now need to add plural forms and common misspellings of words into your campaign.  Do note that you will not be able to target your ads to solely Bing or Yahoo! once the transition is complete.

If you take a few steps now to adjust your campaigns, you will find that once the Yahoo! and Bing transition takes place, you will be up and ready to start capturing more traffic and take advantage of this new powerhouse.

Microsoft sent us this announcement on their new alliance with Yahoo! which we wanted to share with you.  If you have questions on how this impacts your SEM strategy or how this will benefit you in the long run, please contact lodestar marketing group for more information.