Over the past year, Microsoft's Bing portal has been the big gainer in the search market, accounting for more queries each month.

Over the past year, Microsoft's Bing portal has been the big gainer in the search market, accounting for more queries each month. While Microsoft's search engine was flat during the month of July, according to early comScore data posted by Business Insider, the portal's reach has improved considerably since last November.

Last November, 11.8 percent of explicit core searches were performed on Bing. As of July, Microsoft's portal accounts for 14.4 percent, up nearly 3 percent in the last 10 months. Meanwhile, both Google and Yahoo have remained relatively consistent – over the same time period, Google declined 1.1 percent from 66.2 to 65.1 percent and Yahoo is down 0.3 percent from 16.4 to 16.1 percent. Of course, this means that Bing now fields 30.5 percent of explicit core searches as Microsoft also powers Yahoo searches.

The rest of Bing's gains appear to come from ASK and AOL, which have declined by 0.7 percent and 0.5 percent over the past 10 months, respectively.

While Bing isn't taking huge chunks out of Google's market share, it is slowly chipping away at the search giant. If this trend continues, businesses will want to ensure their content marketing efforts are optimized for both Google and Bing-powered searches to maximize reach. Just as Google's Panda updates necessitate high-quality content, Bing officials say SEO marketers should remember that content is key to rankings.