By now, you’ve probably heard that Bing (formerly Live, formerly MSN – but that’s another post entirely) has formed an alliance with Yahoo. The industry has nicknamed this phenomenon “Bing-Hoo.” The companies will be merging their results, but not their interfaces. Paid search results will begin merging sometime between September and December, and organic search results have already started to merge. Here’s a pretty good explanation of what the alliance entails.

So basically, now the results will be the same, whether you go to Yahoo.com or Bing.com (or MSN.com or Live.com – sorry, couldn’t resist another dig). For the average user, it’s a “so-what” thing. But for an SEO, this is pretty serious stuff. Now we have to pay attention to Bing!

Once the alliance is complete, it’s estimated that Bing/Yahoo will own over 30% of the market share. So where we once only had to pay attention to optimizing for Google (and no matter what your agency said, they didn’t have a separate strategy for Bing/Yahoo because it didn’t matter), we now have to actually work on that separate strategy.

The alliance is going to impact your rankings, click through rates and conversion rates.

What’s hard to understand is the agency reaction. No one is talking about the impact this alliance is going to have! Yahoo, Bing, and Google all have vastly different audiences. Merging Yahoo and Bing data is going to impact your expected ranking, your click through rate, and your conversion rate. This is serious stuff.

Make no mistake about it, a laissez-faire attitude is not the way to address this game-changer. If you haven’t talked to your agency already about their plans, do it as soon as possible. If you do SEO in-house, you need to think about how your strategy is going to change. Either way, this checklist should get you started.