TL;DR & Summary

Organic traffic is the second most important thing for an online business owner.

First is sales from that traffic. What about the source of that organic traffic? Google has the biggest market share, but that’s for the end users. What about the business owners? Which search engines help with quality traffic? A million from Google or 100k from Bing? Which search engine is a good source of traffic?

We’ll explore that in this edition.

By the end of this issue, you will be able to decide which search engine to focus on &:

1. Learn how to make the most out of your website by optimizing it for any search engines
2. Understand the pros & cons of Google & Bing as a source of organic traffic for your online business
3. Find the right balance between optimizing for Google & Bing

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When you make your site public, you expect traffic from searches. But that’s now how things work. Think of ROI for the search engines to spend millions & save copies of your pages. A fraction of those pages will ever get any traffic from search engines. At least, that’s the case with Google. In that case, where’s the problem? Is it the search engine or your content pages?

It’s never advisable to put all your eggs in one basket. I personally know several publications that went invisible overnight & never to be found. Thanks to the algorithm update. That’s why you should be aware of other search engines that offer webmaster solutions to help you rank your pages on their search engines.

Thanks to ChatGPT, Bing has crossed 100 million users for the first time. Why not optimize for Bing as well? The reason why people aren’t doing it is a lack of awareness. Most people don’t even know there’s a whole suite of tools from Bing that helps a lot with the optimization of the pages.

I understand it’s way too much to optimize pages for two search engines. Especially when the ranking factors are different for both search engines. But the fundamentals remain the same for all search engines.

Here are the fundamentals of SEO (applicable for both, Google & Bing)

If you abide by these fundamentals, you’ll make your pages eligible to compete with millions of pages that are published every single day:

1. Keyword Research: This involves researching and identifying the relevant keywords and phrases that people use to search for information related to your business. Keyword research helps you understand your target audience and optimize your website’s content to match their search intent.
2. On-Page Optimization: This includes optimizing your website’s content and structure to improve its relevance and readability for both users and search engines. On-page optimization involves optimizing elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and the overall structure of the content.
3. Stay up to date: Both Google & Bing have very well-documented guides & news blogs to help you with keeping up with the pace of changes that occur to the respective algorithms. I’d recommend at least being in the know about both search engines. You can leverage the rewards of the first mover.
4. Analytics and Monitoring: What’s tracked is bound to grow. Measuring the performance of your website and tracking your search engine rankings is essential to identifying areas of improvement and making informed decisions. Analytics and monitoring tools help you track key metrics such as website traffic, user behavior, and search engine rankings to refine your SEO strategy over time.

With the fundamentals, you can make your page eligible to rank on search engines. But which search engine should you focus on?

Let’s explore the pros & cons of both.

#1 Market share

Google crushes the competition with a market share of nearly 90%. But that’s a problem in itself. Google gets a little over 6 billion searches per day across the globe. That’s a lot for an algorithm to cater to. Considering the size of the index, it’s nearly impossible to keep the quality of the results intact. I personally love the features Google as a search engine has to provide. However, the quality of search results has clearly taken a nosedive.

Bing on the other hand has a little over 100 million users and a market share of around 4%. The index is comparatively low, the stress of ranking pages on the algorithm is low, and the searches per day/month is low. But what’s good is, there’s less competition.

#2 Competition

Where there’s little competition, there’s an easy chance of winning. If you’ve optimized for Google and got a little traction, you can focus on Bing and average out the gap. 100 million users searching for solutions isn’t a bad number for any business to make a fortune out of an online business.

Google as a search engine is heavily crowded with pages that aren’t worth being crawled in the first place. It’s not their fault, that’s how search engines work. Bing is at the stage Google was, at 10 years ago. The organic reach is insane & the results in the form of leads & sales are crazy.

#3 Algorithm

The algorithm doesn’t need to be advanced to cater to the users Bing has right now. This makes it easier to rank the pages on Bing SERPs. This directly translates to sales (if optimized for it) and keeps your business afloat amidst the financial crunch. No matter which search engine you optimize for, the end goal of each page that’s life on your website is to make money.

I wouldn’t expect a ton of traffic from Bing, but if I were to optimize your pages for Bing (get in touch if you want me to), I’d optimize the most valuable pages that would directly make you money. 0 sales from Google with a million visitors is better than a few sales from Bing with 1/10th of the organic visitors. Doesn’t that make Bing valuable enough?

Which search engines are better? I think whichever gets you results is good for you. I devised this issue keeping in mind the fact that business owners ignore Bing & unnecessarily rely on Google and Google alone. Don’t you deserve to get traffic from any source that brings results?

That’s it for this one. Continue to read the resources I have curated for you.

SEO this week (News Updates)

1. Bing & Edge gets AI revamp
2. Google has outsourced the job of identifying the right pages to the creators. Now you will need to deindex syndicate content. Read the official update here & more about this from here.

Clickworthy resources

1. Bing guidelines (easy to understand & implement)
2. Kai updated their content to almost double the organic traffic. Learn how
3. Want to convince clients/stakeholders to invest in SEO initiatives? Here’s how you can do it
4. How to use ChatGPT to outsource laborious tasks?

Tools that you should know about

1. One of the LinkedIn & Deepminds Founders teamed up and came up with Pi – A chatbot worth keeping an eye on.
2. Gifts based on someone’s Twitter feed? Yep! There’s a tool for that. Twifts!

Surf the AI Wave

1. Samsung bans AI tools from internal usage.
2. Google doesn’t have a MOAT (Measurement And Operations Team). What does this mean? Is this a threat? Read more→

How can I help you?

I put a lot of effort to come up with a single edition of this newsletter. I want to help you in every possible way. But I can do only so much by myself. I want you to tell me what you need help with. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, Twitter & Email to share your thoughts & questions that you want to be addressed. I’d be more than happy to help.

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If you’re looking forward to winning online, here’s how I can help:

1. Sit with you 1-on-1 & create a content marketing strategy for your startup. Hire me for paid consulting.
2. Write blogs, social posts, and emails for you. Get in touch here with queries (Please mention you found this email in the newsletter to get noticed quickly)
3. Join my tribe on Twitter where I share SEO tips (every single day) & teaser of the next issue of Letters ByDavey.