About a week ago comScore released their qSearch analysis showing how many searches were performed in the U.S. by major search engines for November 2009. Google came out on top of course, but with Bing more than likely powering Yahoo in the near future, an interesting question came up: Is it going to be better to rank #1 in Bing or #2 in Google in 2010?
The ideal situation would land you on top of both search engines, but if you had to pick one, which one would be more beneficial? The decision would vary slightly from industry to industry, but in general, how much traffic would each spot get you?
Google powered about 9.5 billion searches in the month of November for the U.S., which amounts to about 2/3 of the total searches performed. Bing had about 10 percent of the market share and Yahoo had 17.5 percent. If you add up Yahoo and Bing’s searches in the U.S. they total about 4 billion, not even half of Google. Combining those numbers with a study done on search engine result page click through rates will give you a good idea on how much traffic each rank in each search engine gives.
When you crunch the current numbers and take into account that Bing will power Yahoo in 2010, the #1 spot in Bing results will net around 2 billion clicks, assuming search numbers stay roughly the same. Using the same math, the #2 spot in Google will net about 1.2 billion clicks. This shows that, in general, a #1 ranking in Bing will be much more effective than a #2 ranking in Google.
SEOs and marketers should take note of this. Much more energy is spent optimizing for Google than any other search engine even though it might be a better idea to focus on Bing very soon. Since all the energy is being focused on Google, it could be simpler to get better rankings in Bing. While Bing may not beat Google anytime soon in market share, there could be a shift in where some SEOs begin spending more of their time.
