Thread: Why do people even bother with MSN?

Im serious folks, they are a joke to me, i get about 300,000 uv a month on one of my sites and about 5 are from MSN, their market share is so poor its just not worth trying

Why it does not have a bigger share of the market ill never know i suppose it does not feature that high on microsofts priorities.

Quite the opposite actually. It does figure very high on their priorities, they just have not managed to perfect it yet, or get people to use it as much as they use Google. Microsoft are really trying to break into the search engine market, just look at when they tried to buy Yahoo. It's a shame really because I actually believe the MSN/Live search engine performs and works better than Google.

It can throw up some interesting results i know that from using it.

Buying yahoo would be the quickest way of improving their share of the market otherwise they will probably remain in third place after all they do not make their money from search.

I rarely look at my results from MSN anymore. I get more traffic from sites that are much smaller, and this is because few people use their search anymore.

Originally Posted by infinite

Im serious folks, they are a joke to me, i get about 300,000 uv a month on one of my sites and about 5 are from MSN, their market share is so poor its just not worth trying

Really?

I get around 35,000 visitors a month to my site.
Around 1-3% of my traffic comes from MSN...so your doing something wrong if your not getting that much from them.

I get some MSN traffic. Why discount it?

I get some MSN traffic but there is no way I would start a PPC campaign with them. If you want results stick with Google.

-Adam (AKA "The Traffic Guru")

I was top 10 on msn for a prominent keyword for about 1 year "affordable web hosting" and I got 5 hits a month for it. i have now dropped to page 2 and I don't even care.

dont think its worth being Number1 or number 1000 with msn..
who cares ?

Any search traffic is good traffic

What's a deal today, it not might be tomorow, and vice versa you never know, when the day is coming for MSN

Most of the day i am not getting even 1 search visitor from MSN . Most of traffic comes from the big G .

Some Google results really puzzle me sometimes, so it's suprising that MSN hasn't capitalised on this. It looks like the likes of Yahoo! or MSN are going to have to come up with something really, really good if users are ever to change deep-rooted habits.

The facts: Though MSN is the least popular out of the mainstream Primary Search engines, it does receive a considerable amount of traffic.
The question: Which one would you prefer? Listed on the 4th page of Google or Listed on the 2nd page of MSN for the same SEO effort?

It is relatively easy to rank well in MSN because their algorithm is more targeted to the keywords in domain names and keywords in contents as opposed to Yahoo! and Google who use more than keywords as a factor to rank sites.

Lets imagine a scenario: For a keyphrase "make money online", there are 900,000 searches on Google and only 10,000 searches on MSN each day. Through your SEO efforts, you have managed to rank on the first page on MSN search for this keyphrase. Same effort has put on on the 4th page in Google.
Out of the 900,000 searches in Google, how many do you expect to come to the 4th page and check out your listing?
None!!!
Out of the 10,000 searches in MSN, how many do you expect you expect to check out your listing on the first page of the results?
I can safely assume around a thousand, two thousand at least.

There is your answer as to why your should concentrate SEO Organic optimization for MSN too. For new sites, MSN can bring in much more traffic than Google....

Originally Posted by Domain Marvelous

The facts: Though MSN is the least popular out of the mainstream Primary Search engines, it does receive a considerable amount of traffic.
The question: Which one would you prefer? Listed on the 4th page of Google or Listed on the 2nd page of MSN for the same SEO effort?

It is relatively easy to rank well in MSN because their algorithm is more targeted to the keywords in domain names and keywords in contents as opposed to Yahoo! and Google who use more than keywords as a factor to rank sites.

Lets imagine a scenario: For a keyphrase "make money online", there are 900,000 searches on Google and only 10,000 searches on MSN each day. Through your SEO efforts, you have managed to rank on the first page on MSN search for this keyphrase. Same effort has put on on the 4th page in Google.
Out of the 900,000 searches in Google, how many do you expect to come to the 4th page and check out your listing?
None!!!
Out of the 10,000 searches in MSN, how many do you expect you expect to check out your listing on the first page of the results?
I can safely assume around a thousand, two thousand at least.

There is your answer as to why your should concentrate SEO Organic optimization for MSN too. For new sites, MSN can bring in much more traffic than Google....

This is a perfectly good point. So many people find the pages they are looking for in the top 10 Google SERPS. I have read from WebProNews that a lot of people change their search queries if they don't find what they are looking for on page one, which I myself have done. If a page is in the top 10 on MSN it will surely bring traffic. Even though my stats show the vast amount of search traffic coming from Google, I still don't discount MSN or other search engines.

I'm sure it must be better to get a handful of traffic from MSN than none at all. On some of my websites I get lots of traffic from MSN and not much for others. However I would never just not bother with a search engine even if it only gave me 10 visits a month. Those 10 visits could all be paying customers

they actually have a better conversion rate than Google and Yahoo

I believe in what shahab said, it really has better chances of conversion than Google and Yahoo. Also, I guess people bother to use MSN because it is their default website homepage every time they open IE.

What are your thoughts on bing?

As they show ads, other items of MSN, should have septate page for search like google.

MSN does have a smaller share, but it also means some of the tactics that no longer work on Google may be profitable with MSN

Its the brand! Even though there is a huge mob of angry consumers who think Microsoft is the devil, the brand is so uber recognizable and carries a massive weight in actual trust. Microsoft may do little else well, but its marketing department is beyond belief amazing.

the Biggest problem with microsoft is they want to charge very high. if they don't change there strategy soon they will be in trouble.