Adding Bing-Yahoo Ads To Your Marketing Mix

I often focus on providing Google SEO and AdWords tips. There’s a good reason for that. Depending on which search engine report you pay attention to, Google’s search network accounts for about 66% of search engine searches. I thought I would shake things up a bit this month and talk about Bing-Yahoo. After all, you can’t ignore the fact that the Bing-Yahoo search network accounts for roughly 29% of searches.

Now if someone asked me how to optimize a site for Bing-Yahoo SEO, I wouldn’t have the first clue (and I’m supposed to be an expert, right?). I would instead continue to focus on Google Webmaster’s Guidelines for SEO in this case. Use Google’s guidelines and any organic clicks you get from Bing or Yahoo should be viewed as a bonus.

What I will encourage you to do however is to look into the Bing-Yahoo Ad Network (we actually offer a $50 Bing-Yahoo Advertising Credit for you to get started). So why focus on Bing-Yahoo advertising, but not SEO? Competition. I’ll give you an example. It’s no secret that one of the key services we offer is SSD Hosting. One of the keywords we advertise on both AdWords and the Bing-Yahoo ad network is in fact “SSD Hosting”. On AdWords our average keyword rank for “SSD Hosting” is 4.6. Our average rank on Bing-Yahoo is 1.3. Here’s the kicker; we spend less than half per click on Bing-Yahoo ads versus AdWords. So not only are we paying less for keywords, we’re also ranking higher as well.

If you’re ready to start advertising on Bing-Yahoo, you can easily upload your existing AdWords campaign into a new Bing-Yahoo account. I’ve never had much luck using the Bing-Yahoo control panel to do this. Instead just export your AdWords campaign into a .csv file via the AdWords Editor and import it into the Bing Ads Editor. Depending on the size of your campaign, it really shouldn’t take you more than 30-minutes before you start receiving affordable, new traffic.