Australia welcomed this year with some major tech news. Google, which dominates the Australian search engine market, threatened to pull their services from the country. Luckily, search engine Bing in Australia, was ready to take over the reins (probably still drunk with excitement and can’t believe their luck).

While the Google boycott of Australia did not happen, it’s important to understand what led to it.

The Backstory

The threat of Google pulling out of Australia was the result of a legislation forcing tech giants Google and Facebook to pay Australian media companies and news publishers for their content.

In 2019, Google earned almost 5 billion Australian dollars. A significant portion of that came from content marketing using content from media companies. Rightfully, media companies have been complaining about not being fairly compensated for a long time.

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Google (and Facebook) has ignored these issues and refused to pay; threatening the worst-case scenario if the legislation passed. Nevertheless, after weeks of negotiation; the tech giant is staying put in Australia, striking deals with the country’s media companies.

The threat of Google pulling out has empowered search engine Bing in Australia.

Bing not only strongly and publicly showed support for the legislation; its parent company, Microsoft has also made significant improvements to the search engine.

Bing It On!

While Bing only has 3.62% of the search engine market share in Australia, it is a formidable competition for Google.

Here are just a few a reasons you should give the search engine Bing a chance in Australia.

Microsoft Bing

For Individual Users:

  1. Images: Bing offers higher quality images in its results page. Additionally, filtering image results and finding licensing information is easier in Bing than in any search engines. It was also the first search engine to use “infinite scroll”, eliminating the need to click the “next page” button.
  1. Videos: Bing presents the results of a video search as a grid of thumbnails that allows you to watch them without ever having to leave the search results page. You can also hover over the thumbnail to watch a preview; saving you time and energy.
  2. Freebies: You are going to search anyway, why not get paid for it? Bing offers Microsoft Rewards which you can redeem for a variety of perks.
  3. Social Media: Bing has mastered the art of social media integration. Social data is integrated into the results page so you can see trending news and stories from different social media platforms upfront.
  4. Aesthetic: Bing just looks better than Google.

For Businesses:

  1. Transparency: Bing prides itself in its transparency of their ranking factors, so you know exactly what to do to get the top spot.
  2. Cheaper Ads: Since the market is less competitive in Bing, it is a cheaper to advertise there.
  3. Fewer Competition: 3.62% might seem like a small number. However, with millions of searches happening every day, 3.62% is still a huge volume of searches! With fewer competition, you get a big chunk of that massive volume of searches. Most experts agree that Bing is still a big part of their SEO strategy and SEO price.
  4. Local SEO: Bing Places for Business helps local businesses gain visibility. It essentially gives you everything Google My Business can provide. In some ways it’s actually better (eg. multiple locations for one business), in many other ways it’s worse.

Final Thoughts

Bing still trails behind Google and may have well lost its chance to become Australia’s top search engine. Nevertheless, overlooking it would be detrimental to your SEO strategy.

Who knows what the future holds for any search engine, not only in Australia. “Putting it all” on Google might have worked in the past, but this might have been a good lesson to us all – we need to expand our horizons.