Yahoo and MSN/Bing announced this week that you will now see “Powered by Bing” at the bottom of search results on Yahoo.  What we have been hearing since the initial announcement of the Search Alliance is finally coming to fruition; organic search results in Yahoo are now based on Bing’s index and algorithm.  If you have been hesitant to bid on keywords you already ranked well for in Yahoo, now might be a good time to rethink that strategy.  The fact is, most websites ranked differently in the two engines prior to the partnership and now that difference can directly affect your site’s performance and your company’s bottom line.

One strategy I believe is very relevant today, given the Yahoo-Bing search partnership, is leveraging the keywords from organic traffic and adding those keywords to your PPC campaign.  This approach takes on greater significance if your website historically ranked well in Yahoo, and not so well in MSN/Bing.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you soon will see a major change in traffic to your site based on how well your site is ranked by Bing’s index. You can offset the loss of traffic from Yahoo’s organic rankings by adding the keywords you ranked well for into your PPC campaigns.

Hopefully you employ an analytics tool to analyze and identify sources of traffic and the keywords that drive people to your site.  Google Analytics (GA) is an excellent choice given its wide array of features and cost (it’s free!).  It is imperative you bridge the gap between Yahoo and MSN/Bing for any terms you held strong organic positions in Yahoo, but lack under the Bing index.  The quickest way to accomplish this is to incorporate those terms into your PPC campaign.  In this way, you can maintain a strong presence for search queries in Yahoo even if your organic rankings are buried by Bing’s algorithm, while you work to improve your organic presence.

There have been whisperings in the air and at meetings about a particular merger. Some held their breath, while others thought it would never happen. Well, it’s official. Yahoo and MSN/Bing are merging their search efforts to form a union known as the Search Alliance.

Search Alliance is the name that Yahoo and MSN/Bing are using for the search merger. However, at the same time they are still competitors. Although Yahoo and MSN/Bing have joined forces in the search arena, they will still remain competitors in the display market. If a company is running display campaigns with either of the engines, they will be unaffected by the merger in regard to through which engine their display ads will be managed.

The Search Alliance merger will allow Yahoo results to be powered by MSN/Bing. When the transition is complete advertisers will be managing their paid search campaigns in MSN/Bing AdCenter. Any advertiser who has been advertising in both Yahoo and MSN/Bing for search will only need to focus on optimizing the MSN/Bing campaigns because their Yahoo campaigns will be turned off. For advertisers who are only advertising in Yahoo, they will need to make sure that they get a MSN/Bing account set up.

The Search Alliance should prove interesting. Many questions arise such as will cpc’s go up? What search partner sites will I show up on? One of the most daunting questions is how will the merger affect my traffic and my ROI? There is one answer for all of these questions. The answer is only time will tell. 

The search engine marketing landscape is ever changing, and the second half of this year will prove to be no different.  There is one change that we’ve talked about with many of our clients, but unless you are immersed within the industry on a daily basis, this still may be unknown to you.  Yahoo and Microsoft (Bing) have created a partnership called the Search Alliance. 

So you may be asking, what exactly will be happening? Essentially two major changes will be taking place.  One is with the organic search results and the other with the paid search results.

For organic search, Bing will be the driving force (algorithm) behind the results.  Therefore, once this transition takes place, when you conduct a search on Yahoo!, the results that you see will be determined by the same algorithm that determines Bing’s organic results.  That being said, we expect that soon Yahoo! and Bing will have the same organic results.  The testing for the organic results is said to begin this summer, with the full (organic) transition taking place in August / September.  Keep in mind that once this transition takes place, Yahoo’s search results may still have a Yahoo look and feel.  So if you’ve never really cared or paid attention to your Bing positions, you definitely need to now!

On the paid search side, a lot of changes are also being made. Until now, marketers have been using two different platforms for managing their advertising on Bing and Yahoo. With the Search Alliance, marketers will now use one platform – Microsoft’s adCenter – to manage their paid search. The paid search transition should be finalized before the holiday season, but it could be pushed back into 2011 if needed. While many are touting that this will be easier for advertisers as they’ll have one place to manage their ads for both Yahoo and Bing, there are a few critical things that should be considered. First, there will no longer be a way to monitor your Bing ads separately from your Yahoo! ads. Your ads will soon be eligible to show on the “Search Alliance”.  In addition, as you probably have experienced, Bing and Yahoo! have different searcher demographics. As this Search Alliance takes place, your campaigns will likely require lots of initial monitoring and optimization tactics as a result of this “new” market. Also, if you transition your campaigns from another account over to adCenter, you will be starting with a blank slate in terms of historical performance, which will have to be built up over time.