Thoughts on Bing/Yahoo Serps

[bluecollar]

As I work to re-engage after a multi-year hibernation, I've got an itch to scratch with Bing/Yahoo and am wondering if others could chime in with some best practices for Binghoo. My plan is to focus on Binghoo traffic for local lead generation but I realize that I know very little that is current about what's needed for these two. I recognize that most don't pay attention to non-Google engines, but that's exactly why I think it makes sense for me to focus here while I get my feet wet again in this game.

Maybe this thread could be useful to gather up some best practices for these lesser-focused on engines. So, what's the deal with Bing/Yahoo in 2020?

Thanks!

 

[Steve]

Before you go down this road, I would recommend you open an ad account with bing and run some ads to see if there is any volume at all. There is a reason most people don't bother with it

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wouldn't ever bother trying to optimize directly for lesser search engines. Most are going to trail behind Google and try to mimic them. The logic behind what Google is doing is solid, and if you optimize for them you're optimizing for the rest that are still reading titles and headers and creating a link graph.

And in this way you get the Google traffic + traffic from the rest. There's zero reason to leave any traffic on the table.

If you want to get your feet wet again, find a niche that is less competitive in Google. The volume there will still be better than competing in Bing & Yahoo, in which you'll have 100% of the exact same competitors anyways. All of the same players exist in those search engines by virtue of existing on the internet.

 

[Samwise89]

This isn't extremely relevant but when Penguin first came out and everyone got slaughtered for spam, I hear a lot of people realized that if they kept spamming even harder they would dominate on Bing and Yahoo and keep making their Adsense money or affiliate sales. It wasn't as much, of course, but better than letting the domains expire.

Sadly, it turned out a lot of those people used the sites to sell links instead. Even now if you look at Public Blog Network sites they're mostly penalized and have no traffic. That's what most of the "Guest Post Outreach" services sell. They pretend to outreach and sell you posts on old penalized sites with a lot of content.