This example is from one of my clients, who’s got a seasonal business and had a great winter.
Two screenshots up the difference between Google visibility and Bing visibility. The screenshots are of those two search engines’ “dashboard” stats. I doubt either source of intel is Swiss-watch accurate, but each can give you a rough sense of how many people see you on that search engine’s local map.
Bing Places dashboard stats:
Nice spike. Reflects how good business was.
Notice the high-water mark of 957 impressions. Add up all the times the Bing Places page showed up in the local search results in February and you’ve got a few thousand impressions in a month, which is pretty good. Who said Bing doesn’t matter?
Now, Google My Business stats, from a somewhat different range (more on that in a minute):
One thing you’ll notice is a high-water mark of almost 9000 impressions in a day on Google My Business, compared to high-water mark of a tenth of that in a whole week on Bing.
My little comparison is far from scientific. You may notice the date ranges aren’t the same. Bing’s doesn’t capture most March, which had a good amount of action. That’s because Bing’s data is about two weeks old and doesn’t reflect more-recent data, and neither Google nor Bing lets you pick a custom date range. The result is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Still, based on the parts that overlap, impressions on Google outnumber those on Bing by at least 10 to 1. (Probably more like 20 to 1.)
“Hey Phil, party foul. That’s still an unfair comparison. Google has so much more market share than Bing has, so of course Bing’s local traffic is a gnat.”
Exactly. It’s a good thing that Bing Places is pretty hassle-free to set up and manage, because my advice is not to lose sleep over your Bing rankings.
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