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Why Bing is Important

I’ve been in the website business for over ten years now.During that time I also owned a computer and cell phone repair business. With all the experience I have in the tech business, I can honestly say that I’ve never willingly used Microsoft Internet Explorer nor it’s new iteration: Microsoft Edge.

I just never liked it. I guess the horrible experiences of developing websites that had to work on IE7 were enough to taint me for the rest of my life. The trauma of seeing a big blue e would send me into cold sweats.

The problem is, most people are not like me. Most people have never had a ‘bad’ experience with Internet Explorer and wouldn’t recognize the difference in page load speeds or rendering. I’m a techie snob when it comes to Microsoft search engines.

However, what I have always known is that Microsoft search engines come installed with every new personal computer, laptop, tablet and phone that runs the Windows operating system. That’s a helluva lot of devices.

What I also know from my time in the computer repair business is while some of us take for granted the ease we experience in loading Chrome on our own devices, most people either don’t know how nor do they want to be bothered loading Chrome. So, that’s the long way of saying Bing is on a lot of machines!

Bing Statistics Facts from StatistaBecause Bing is so popular, by default they have a lot of traffic. According to StatCounter, Bing has about a 7% share of all the online search in the United States. That’s a lot of searches! In fact, it’s over 500 million of them.

Simply put, if you’re ignoring Bing (as I have been) you’re missing out on a lot of potential customers. As an added bonus, the people using Bing… well, they’re the ones with the expendable income. According to J. Clement at Statista “As of March 2018, Bing audiences in the U.S. comprised mostly of those in the age group of between 45-54 years range…”

So, to wrap this up, I know we all base our digital marketing strategy and our website strategy on Google. We spend hours every week (or we should be) agonizing over our Google My Business listing but we ignore Bing Places for Business. I’m hoping to help you see the light here. I’m hoping you’ll come along with me and figure out the ins and outs of Bing. Yes I know it’s just one more thing. But, if we do it right, we will open our businesses to 500 Million more searches.

I think it’s worth it.