Google is Slipping and Church Marketing is Shifting

In an article on the Christian SEO Guys blog, “Bing to Dethrone Google?“,I reported on the ongoing shift in the search engine market from Google to Bing.  According to Experian’s Hitwise.com, in less than one year Bing’s market share has increased by nearly 27% while Google’s share has decreased by nearly 11%.

So, what does that have to do with church marketing?

One of the major elements of an online church marketing strategy is search engine optimization.  We cover SEO extensively in the CMO University series and much of the time we focus on Google…and with good reason.  Google has consistently maintained over 2/3 of the world wide search traffic.  That is no longer the case.

While Google still gets more than twice the number of searches as Bing, they had been getting 3 times Bing’s traffic just a few months ago.  Bing is gaining and if the rate of change that has been occurring for the past 6+ months continues, Bing would actually be more popular than Google in less than a year.

Graph from TFTS

That may not happen.  A lot can change in a year and I’m sure Google isn’t just going to sit on their hands, but it would be wise to start thinking more about Bing in your church SEO efforts and get ahead of the curve.  Add to this mix that Bing has engineered a pretty close relationship with Facebook (that Google does not have) and they are in a pretty good position to continue to improve their market share.

Having great rankings in Bing certainly won’t hurt and you may find that it’s more important than Google rankings in the not-too-distant future.

You can read more about how Bing is dethroning Google at the Christian SEO Guys blog.

What do you think?  Should churches start focusing more on Bing with their search marketing or is it still too early to make that shift?