Using MSNs Search Funnels For Better Optimization

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

MSN (or soon to be known BING) has been making a small comeback lately. The company once thought of as a joke (and still are by many) in the search space is actually making itself more competitive. They may never be true competitor with Google, but one tool that I find to be very promising is the Search Funnel tool.

With search funnels you can see which search queries people follow up initial search queries with. This is very helpful. If you are building a poetry site, for instance, you can type the word “poetry” into MSNs search funnel tool and see which queries people follow up a search for poetry with. You’ll see that 9.48% of the searchers search for “poems” after searching for “poetry”. 4.26% search for “love poems”.

Conduct the same test with “search engine optimization” you’ll see that only 1.01% of searchers follow up with a search for “seo” but that 5.05% follow up with a search for “india seo”.

This could be a helpful tool in a number of ways. While you can’t tell why people are searching for what they are searching for, you can use the information to better hone the SEO on your website. Why not use “india seo” as a secondary keyword if you know you have a large potential audience in that region? Secondly, you could use those follow-up queries as primary keywords and build new pages around them. I bet your competition hasn’t thought of that. But you can.