Microsoft announced that it is rebranding its advertising product for SMBs as “Bing, powered by Bing and Yahoo! Search”. The company says that this is to simplify the way small business search advertisers do business with Microsoft.

“By aligning with the Bing brand, SMBs will better understand that they are buying traffic on Bing and Yahoo! search,” a spokesperson for Microsoft tells WebProNews. “Many of our advertisers find us through the Bing homepage, where they click on ‘Advertise here.’ This shift helps those customers follow a more intuitive path to what they are looking for.”

The change is effective today.

“With one ad buy through Microsoft Advertising adCenter, search advertisers are able to reach 158 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites), providing a sizable volume of 5.6 billion monthly searches and a 29% search share, which is nearly one-third of all queries in the US,” says Microsoft’s GM of SMB Advertising, Matt Lydon, citing comScore data.

“Our audience is significant in size and in online purchase activity,” he adds. “The unique searchers on Bing and Yahoo! Search (including Microsoft and Yahoo! Core Search sites) are likely to spend 26% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 9% more than Google searchers in the U.S.”

He also notes that advertisers can reach 49 million unique searchers using Bing and Yahoo, that don’t use Google in the US.

The “search alliance” between Microsoft and Yahoo continues to roll on. Last month, it finalized in the UK, Ireland and France.