How are Bing and Yahoo outcompeting Google for startup traffic?

Yahoo and Bing are consistently sending more highly targeted organic search traffic to my startup than Google. How is this possible?

Google dominates the search market, with about 66% of US traffic - clearly a far greater percentage of search traffic than all of the other search engines combined.

So if Google has the lion's share of the search market, why are Yahoo and Bing sending my startup, design-a-webpage.com, qualified organic search traffic for the SEO keywords and phrases that are targeted by the site? The answer could be part of a strategy to claw their way back.

Let's take a look...

Search engines 101

In order to be a successful search engine, you need to do two things very well:

1. Index as many pages as possible
2. Consistently return the most relevant and useful search results

If you provide the fastest, most relevant search results, you're going to do well. From there, you can take a shot at providing products and services, such as advertising, from which you can then derive a revenue stream.

So page indexing is more a geeky, technical problem that isn't really part of our remit here. However, in order to return the most relevant and useful search results, you need to create an algorithm that weighs all sorts of different metrics in order to rank pages according to how useful you think they are.

Search engine optimization and page ranking

Google is always in the news. Every time they tweak their PageRank algorithm, it causes a stir. Most notable was the recent Panda updates that effectively punished websites that were duplicating original content without contributing much themselves. Publishers of original content benefited greatly (Site prebuilder jumped from PR 4 to PR 6).

But here's where it gets interesting. Google has said that longevity is a factor in ranking their pages. It makes sense because pages that have been around for a while are likely to be of higher quality. But we all know how frustrating it is to do a search and be sent to a page that is ten years old.

Admittedly longevity is no longer the force it was. Google kept it as a factor, but lessened its importance. In fact, freshness of content - how often new content is added to a site - has become more important.

But my guess is that Bing and Yahoo must have taken this a step further.

Bing and Yahoo stepping in front of Google

If you are able to determine quality content fairly reliably, then, from the point of view of businesses, entrepreneurs and startups who are creating genuine high quality websites, you can garner a lot of good will and favor by ranking them highly in your search results.

In the case of design-a-webpage.com, a web design cross internet marketing hybrid service, Yahoo and Bing are driving traffic for highly competitive keywords like:

• designing a webpage
• how to design a webpage
• trial webpage design
• webpage design
• how to create webpage
• designer pages
• webpage

Whereas Google so far has driven traffic on the following keywords:

• design-a-webpage.com
• http://design-a-webpage.com/
• simple website layout design

There's a clear difference in the type of traffic that is coming from Yahoo and Bing, as opposed to Google. Google is driving traffic only for long tail keywords (long search phrases that are not as competitive), or direct searches for the site itself. Clearly this is not particularly useful, from the perspective of design-a-webpage.com.

Where Yahoo and Bing might succeed

The point of this article is not to criticize Google. Personally, I think they're great, and without the thousands of organic search hits Site prebuilder gets from them, there wouldn't be too much impetus to continue creating content.

However, from the point of view of the founder of a startup, I am far more likely to expend effort and resources pressing home the advantage I have with Yahoo and Bing. If they are prepared to give design-a-webpage a shot, without the need for years of laborious and painstaking SEO content generation, then I'm prepared to work with them.

It's simple entrepreneurship. Grab your opportunities. And in this case, the organic search opportunities are coming from Yahoo and Bing, not Google.

If the people driving new content, sites, ideas, startups and online business come to recognize that Bing and Yahoo have placed greater value (through their index and page ranking algorithms) on new, high quality content, then the next generation of startups may spend far more time working with Yahoo and Bing than Google.

If Google does not come up with a strategy to combat this shift in the way content creators work, they may find themselves losing ground. And, if there's one thing the Internet has taught us, no-one's position is guaranteed indefinitely.

Google might seem all powerful now, but if Yahoo and Bing can put newer content at the top of their results and still make those results as useful (if not more), then it won't be long before momentum swings in their direction. Google will be forced to alter its algorithms.

I for one am going to go and have a look at what Bing and Yahoo have to offer design-a-webpage. I've never even bothered with them before... until now.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you noticed an increase in organic search from Bing and Yahoo to your small business website or startup? Drop a note in the comments below or reply to this post on Twitter or Google+.