Getting Your Legal Site Ready for the Bing/Yahoo Merger

Yahoo announced that the organic search results on Yahoo will be powered by Bing beginning in August/September. Yahoo is already testing Bing results on some result pages and its only a matter of time before the current Yahoo organic results are replaced by the Bing results.

Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your legal website?

YES because the bottom line is that both Yahoo and Bing produce a good amount of traffic and according to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010. Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

So if you can get your site listed highly in the Bing organic listings, then that will carry over to Yahoo and it should produce a good amount of traffic to your site.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE FOR BING

Optimizing your web site for Bing.com is not that much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages, good content and high quality inbound links from other sites if you want to see your website in the top 1o results for keywords related to your legal practice.

The difference will be the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.  In some cases you might be ranked well at both Google and Bing but not for all keywords.  So its going to take some expermenting to see what works the best and here are some quick tips.

• Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing.
• If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.
• Use the webmaster tools at Bing and register your site and also a sitemap. They also have a bunch of good Search engine optimization tips for your site.

Its time to recognize that Google is not the only search engine out there and that BING is for real and it makes sense to try and get your site ranked well at Bing in addition to Google.

If your law firm needs assistance with their SEO marketing campaigns or if you want us to help you get good Bing SEO organic rankings for your legal site, contact us today.