Preparing Our Clients for the Yahoo/Bing Search Alliance
20 Aug 2010 1 Comment
in Search Marketing Strategies
As some of you may (or may not) know, by late August/early September the Search Alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft will take place. For those of you who receive a decent portion of traffic from Yahoo organic or who run paid ads in Yahoo, this change is significant.
This month, we have been solely focused on further optimizing websites for Bing and transitioning Yahoo paid search accounts to Bing’s adCenter. This is a very important merger and since most of you do have a significant portion of traffic coming to your site from Yahoo, we need to plan accordingly.
Here is what this transition means from both an organic (SEO) and PPC (paid ad) perspective.
Organic Search:
Yahoo! organic search results will be powered by Bing as early as late August. Here are a few things we are doing to optimize your sites better for Bing and this transition:
- Comparing your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
- Modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate (only applicable to those who run paid ads).
- Optimizing your website for the Microsoft platform crawler (Bing listings will attribute for 30% of organic listings immediately after the change and the % will gradually increase in the coming months).
You still may see a drop in Yahoo organic traffic (especially if less of your organic traffic comes from Bing now) the first couple of weeks. This is natural and will only be temporary. The work we are doing now is to avoid this.
Paid Search:
Here are the steps we are taking for paid advertisers:
- Transitioning or linking accounts to the adCenter platform
- Reviewing the new editorial guidelines and making sure all ads meet the criteria
- Shortening ad copy (Bing ads accept less characters than yahoo)
- Expanding keyword lists: Yahoo! maps keyword variations to the primary form of the word, but adCenter treats singular/plural variations and common misspellings as individual keywords.
- Checking your bids meet adCenter’s minimum requirement
This is a high level overview. We will be posting more info in the coming weeks here on our Blog.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us. We are working hard to insure this transition work in your favor, after all that is the goal of the Microsoft & Yahoo Search Alliance – to serve more relevant ads and put your ads in front of a large audience.
Regards,
Fortune Web Staff
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