Is Bing Making a Dent in Google's Dominance?

As websites continue to see a rise in visits from searches conducted on Bing, the search engine optimization world wonders about the degree of focus the search engine should be given. On average, Bing pales in comparison to Google at percentage of organic traffic share (10.5 percent vs. 78.1 percent in this year's third quarter). However, withFacebook Graph Search presenting Bing search results since January, and now Apple defaulting to Bing as a blanket solution for questions Siri can't answer, is Bing really beginning to gain ground? The answer is a little and there's potential for more, but no thanks to Siri or Facebook … yet.

Siri Not Making a Difference for Bing
Apple made the decision to use Bing to help Siri out with the release of its latest software update, iOS 7. When looking at paid data, we're seeing Google having an even larger share of clicks with visitors using iPhones and iPads.

On the organic listing side of things, this seems to be confirmed when compiling the limited amount of data we have since the new iOS was released a month-and-half ago. A before-and-after comparison of year-over-year percentage change revealed Bing at 214 percent before Siri's help, and a mere 111 percent after.

So while it seems like a big win for Bing to have won the battle for Siri's search engine, it hasn't translated into making much of a difference in the amount of traffic sites are getting from Bing.

Facebook Sending More Traffic, But Not ‘Organic’
The traffic being sent to sites from Facebook's Graph Search isn't counted as Bing "organic" traffic, but each visit is coming from a page powered by Bing. Marketers, however, are going to see this traffic as part of Facebook and allocate resources accordingly. The only attribution to Bing is a hardly noticeable icon in the upper right-hand corner.

While we see a noticeable difference in traffic from Facebook's Graph Search since its introduction Jan. 15, the benefit Bing is getting out of the deal seems negligible (just a mini logo).