Beyond Google - The Value Of Adding Yahoo & Bing - Part 3

GAINING RANKINGS COMPETITORS HAVE THROWN AWAY

Now that we've seen how much search traffic your competitors may be ignoring (comScore reported combined search usage for Yahoo and Bing as 28% as of July 2010), let's see what that means when we target all the search engines instead of just the big one.

DIRECT SEARCH ENGINE SITE SUBMISSIONS

Each search engine will do its best to find your site, whether directly submitted or not. Often, it will discover links (or backlinks) to your site when it revisits other sites in its index.  All too often I hear "well, if the search engines will find my site anyhow, why should I waste my time submitting it myself?"

While it's true that search engines may eventually discover your website if you let them track it down on their own, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be fully indexed -- or even at all. Taking the process a step further, it also means you may not have as big of a ranking priority as your site might deserve.

Search engines are like restaurant diners - they like to be brought their menu so they can see what might be of interest, and they like to have their orders brought and served to them. If you went out for a meal, and found out that you were expected to figure out what the chefs could (or would cook), and then even had to go into the kitchen to put together your own meal; you would wonder why you had to go through so much extra effort just to get your meal.

For search engines, they're willing to do that, but will be much happier to return for more dining visits if the meal [your website] is delivered to them. The faster they can see the menu [what site pages you have available], the faster they can sample all your content.

Now let's translate that to Yahoo and Bing (the search engines your competitors haven't bothered to serve since they only eat at Google's fine establishment:

Your competitor's site might get discovered by the other search engines (and may even get indexed or ranked), but here's your chance to present your full assortment of content while they only get to show a small taste of their pitch.

If your competitor has been completely ignoring Yahoo and Bing, then there's also a good chance they aren't getting very strong representation in the listings – or at least not as strong as they could have received.

Since they aren't bothering to go after the high placement listings (feeling the effort isn't worth their time), you can keep the added search engines happy by going for the top placements your competitor skipped out on. If a user simply prefers using Yahoo or Bing, you're now the site they're likely to visit since your competitor may not even be showing up in the search listing.

That's free business (and a potential lifelong customer) heading your way instead of theirs.