Going from western Europe to eastern Europe you can’t overlook Yandex. Optimizing for one Bing does not mean optimizing for another, at least yet. It therefore makes sense to optimize for Bing in Europe, but be careful: in many countries Bing is nothing more than Live Search with a Bing logo. Bing also is the “runner up” in many other European countries with France leading the way with a 2.8% share.
Adding Yahoo’s Bing-powered results can add another 4% making Bing a very good alternative to Google. Bing now accounts for about 4% of the search market share in the UK. As in almost every country Google is the dominant force, but here we see that Bing is more popular than anywhere else. The UK offers the closest step from the US market to the European market.
Lets take a look at some of the alternatives. With Europe’s more than 800 million people, of whom about 60% spends time online, even a small percentage using alternatives to Google offer attractively large numbers, and targeting users of those search engines could be very profitable. Bing should be the designated search engine to become that big competitor, but for now that is not the case.ĭespite its dominance, there are alternative search engines in Europe, and for search marketers they’re worth looking at.
As I wrote in my last article, Europe could use some competition for Google. Google is the dominant force in Europe-there is no other search engine which even comes close to Google’s market share.