An Analysis of Search Results From the Yahoo and Bing Alliance

In the world of search engines there has been a huge upheaval. Two large and dominant search engines have combined forces to form an alliance in order, possibly, to be able to better take on the Google behemoth.
And for every action there will be an equal and opposite reaction: whatever Yahoo and Bing do together from now on will surely elicit a response from Google, be it for better or for worse. That’s the equal reaction. And what’s the opposite reaction?
Well, the search engine’s organic results will generate a fresh new take on the same search engine’s paid results, and vice versa, regardless of whether the marketers behind the search engine optimization industry have a specific SEO, PPC or both.
In its August 2010 email to all advertisers, prominently titled “Important Updates On The Organic And Paid Search Transitions”, Yahoo announced its organic search transition as well as testing of paid account transitions while reiterating the company’s commitment to a quality search transaction every time.
The email, unfortunately, did not include any useful information for advertisers to evaluate the differences between the old ways and the new search alliance between Bing and Yahoo. So we thought it might be helpful to include a few of our own tips to allow you to improve your future SEO and PPC campaigns.

Tips to Improve your SEO and PPC Campaigns

The first thing that you should be doing is documenting the keyword ranking, competitor positioning, your company’s position, indexed pages and crawling issues for the last 4-12 months on Google, Yahoo! and Bing prior to transition. Ideally you will have a detailed history of your SEO campaigns and you will be able to thus evaluate the impact of the transition, so that it will help your strategy in realistic ways going forward.
You also need to document all the paid search elements for the last 4-12 months with Google, Yahoo! and Bing prior to the transition. A paid search history stretching back to at least a few months will be important in evaluating the impact of the alliance on your campaigns and give you the opportunity to maximize your performance in future months.
The third step is to start documenting your web analytics reporting for the last 4-12 months of search engine traffic for all search engines. It is a given, almost, that the transition will definitely have an impact on the distribution of your search traffic. Therefore, you will need these detailed reports to adjust your future plans to guarantee the best chance of success.
Fourth, review and confirm that your webmaster tools for all search engines are up to date, accurate and complete in terms of the XML sitemap, robot.txt, etc.
As part of this same exercise you will need to update the email address and other contact information and billing information for all your paid search accounts, just so you are not caught unawares by any changes in the layout after the transition which may make changing this information later difficult in the initial stages.
With greater planning and by continually monitoring all the analytics available to you, you can be assured of a smooth transition into this new era of search engines.