I don’t know if Bing will become a verb, but it has the potential to take a decent chunk out of Google’s market share. Google still dominates the market, but there is a cycle to everything and they won’t have their historic 70% search market forever.
For those companies that have sites where they are maximized for organic search engine optimization, the market fragmentation really doesn’t matter that much. For those companies that have their pay per click campaigns on cruise control with Google, they may start to see some changes in the market over the next few years and may need to adjust accordingly.
Microsoft still dominates the corporate desktop/network market. What are the implications for search? B2B research and buying decisions will be made on business Windows based machines… will Bing lead in search done at the office where different sorts of search, research and buying are done? I think it’s a possibility.
Regardless, I’m keeping tabs on my client’s Analytic stats to see what category of search terms are more frequent for Bing.
I had suggested to a current client that they may want to consider some SEO work for the company website. The owner did not see the benefit at this time and said, “Almost all of our business is referral.”
I have an awkward time arguing that point. There is a bit of the chicken and the egg aspect to converting web traffic to clients for a professional services firm.
In the case of this particular response from a client, there are a few aspects of his business that may very well be served by improved SEO and increased traffic. The site now generally serves as a marketing brochure. Looking at the existing traffic, it’s apparent that the users coming to the site know the company exists and are most likely using it as a way to find a phone number, email or mailing address.
The key point here is that the traffic coming in is not likely the sort of traffic that has a ‘problem’ that could be solved by becoming a client of this firm. That’s the sort of focused traffic that I’ll be looking to generate for them. Yes, almost all of their business is referral, but I want to change that.
Lets look at a basic start to calculating ROI for them:
- 500 visitors/month increase due to SEO;
- 2% call to action (phone,email,contact,rfi);
- results in 10 ‘leads’;
- 10% close rate on those leads, conversion to client;
- results in 1 additional client per month
I actually think that the 2% call to action in this case is low. Somebody looking for a firm that does X will not go through 50 sites prior to contacting one, but I’ll go with that to be conservative.
The owner has to buy into the benefits of SEO. Being able to put a solid ROI calculation in front of them is a good first step.