As an e-marketer, you might be wondering how the upcoming Yahoo/Microsoft Search Alliance may or may not affect you. Even though you might use Google for all your search needs, your goal is to have visibility on all search engines, so here is an update on what will be happening on Yahoo and Microsoft Bing:

Natural Search

Yahoo Search, along with Bing, will now be supplied by Microsoft. This means that if you have a site that has great organic visibility on Yahoo, but none on Bing, you’re in trouble. If you are equally visible on both, but rely on Google anyway, this is probably the way it is for most sites. In this case, you could do almost nothing, and expect the same results. However, putting new efforts into optimizing the site for Yahoo/Bing would be a good idea, since the combined search volume will at least begin to approach Google. This whole process will start taking effect in August and will probably complete by the end of August.

Paid Search (PPC)

The Yahoo Pay-Per-Click platform will be going away, probably as early as September. Microsoft AdCenter will now allow you to manage paid results on both Yahoo and Bing. Essentially, AdCenter will show the same ads on both Yahoo and Bing. AdCenter will operate much the same as it has been except that now, obviously, there are a lot more keywords available, and existing keywords have much more search volume. Anyone using tracking codes on PPC ads will need to change these, but, by and large, as long as the AdCenter account that has been setup is built out as well or better than it is in Yahoo, not much else will need to be done when the switchover is made. The Yahoo accounts will simply not be active anymore.

As you can see, a lot of changes will be happening over the next few months. We will continue to keep you updated on how this initiative might affect your e-marketing efforts. In the meantime, feel free to contact us to find out how we can help optimize and evolve your Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click programs.