Did you know that you are losing a potential exposure to a 1.08 billion audience and being a part of an almost 12 billion monthly search volume?
When it comes to search engines, our mind automatically thinks about Google and it is fair, given that Google occupies the largest market share among all the share engines. So, we are always looking for the best SEO practices for Google, how to make our web pages rank on Google, and keeping track of Google’s webmaster guidelines and algorithm updates.
In short, our SEO strategies are always focused on Google.
But by being only focused on the Google search engine alone, you are losing out on many opportunities that can be used to your advantage to leverage your business on other search engines.
After Google, Bing search engine is the most popular search engine with a whopping 1.08 billion monthly visitors and 12 billion monthly search volume, which you can make use of only if you focus on a little bit of Bing SEO too.
Fortunately, you are at the right place to understand all things about Bing.
This guide is broken down into easily understandable chunks to gently break down the path to Bing SEO and its implementation for you.
Microsoft Bing, commonly known as Bing, is backed by another industry giant, Microsoft Corporation, and has been in the game since 2009. So it has come a long way too and has a fair share of loyal users, as seen in the statistics noted above. This should come as an assurance that all your Bing SEO efforts are not going in vain and are definitely going to reap benefits.
But apart from that, there are many other advantages that you can get when you channel your efforts towards Bing SEO.
Advantages of carrying out Bing SEO:
You might not know but Bing powers other search engines like Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL, Ecosia, Lycos, and Qwant.
And so, if you optimize your website for Bing, you are automatically optimizing your website for the above-mentioned search engines, since they are all partnered with Bing.
How convenient is it?
Bing is built into many Microsoft products like Microsoft Office and Xbox as well as voice searches like Alexa and Cortana use Bing.
Also, Bing has a lower competition rate since most of the marketers flock to Google. But with the growing number of Bing desktop users, it accounts for 26.8% of desktop users in the US only, and you have the opportunity to outperform your competitors in the share of desktop queries if you are carrying out Bing SEO.
Take a look at your Google web analytics. It can provide you with enough insights into how your website performs on different search engines, which will automatically help you understand if Bing brings you, good quality users, with lower bounce rates and more session times.
How is Bing SEO different from Google SEO?
Most of the ranking factors that the search engines use are similar, though the algorithms are different. So some of your search engine optimization techniques for Bing luckily remain the same.
What makes Bing different from Google is that it is more open about the various factors that it takes into consideration when it comes to ranking. This means the opportunity to reap rewards with comparatively lesser efforts.
How Bing works and the important factors:
One thing that Bing has made pretty clear is that cherry-picking the ranking factors to optimize your website will not fetch you any results.
If everyone starts prioritizing only one criterion, it will become less indicative of relevance. Consequently, the algorithm may assign lesser importance to it.
This is why we are covering all the major factors that can impact your website:
- Relevance:
The content on your page should match the searcher’s intent for it to be qualified as relevant. This means the search terms should match with the terms in your content or in the links to the referring page.
Bing also considers semantic equivalents such as synonyms and abbreviations, which may not match exactly with the search term but may have the same meaning.
2. Quality and credibility:
When it comes to quality and credibility, Bing looks at the site’s reputation, author’s reputation, transparency, quality of the content, and the discourse as some of the important factors.
This means if your site is dedicated to a specific topic and is creating quality content, then it is easier for you to rank for that topic than for a different topic.
Provide external links and citations and add the name of the author. This indicates to Bing that your content is credible and researched.
3. User engagement:
Through engagement signals like Click Through Rate (CTR), dwell-time, bounce rates, Bing ranks the content. But if you try to manipulate the signals by faking engagement, the same can be detected by Bing’s own mechanisms.
4. Freshness:
Nobody likes to read outdated content or news. So, of course, Bing or any other search engines are going to prioritize content based on its freshness and date of update. But Bing has made it clear that it can very well detect if there is no actual update in the content, but only a change in the date of publishing to make it look fresh.
5. Location:
Bing uses your language and location to provide information during local searches. When people search for queries like “bakery near me”, the location you are based in will be looked at to see if you are qualified to rank for the search.
6. Page load time:
To give users a good experience, your website needs to quickly provide what they are looking for which needs good site speed. A website with poor site speed will have more bounce rates, leading to poor user engagement which means your website’s performance in the Bing search ranking will be affected.
Best Bing SEO practices:
- Bing mentions in its webmaster tools page that it prioritizes good quality backlinks over the quantity of backlinks. If your website has good quality inbound links from trusted websites, that is enough to boost your ranking. This means you need to focus on getting links from sites with higher authority.
- It favors links from old domains as it is a sign of credibility, along with trusted domains like .edu, .gov, and .org.
- Use the exact keywords you are targeting in Heading 1, Heading 2, meta descriptions, and alt tag of your page because Bing takes the exact keyword into account, unlike Google, which takes semantics into account.
- Use schema markup on your website to present structured data, as it will make your Bing search engine listing richer in detail.
- Bing uses signals from social media shares of your page content to understand its popularity and boost its ranking. This is only possible if you have good quality content that satisfies the user intent and makes people want to engage.
- To appear for more local searches, get your business listed in Bing Places. This way, your claimed business will appear when someone does a local search.
Helpful tools for Bing SEO:
- Bing Webmaster Guidelines – This will help you understand how Bing finds, indexes, and ranks websites. These guidelines will help to optimize your website and increase the opportunity to rank for relevant queries.
- Bing SEO Analyzer – It analyzes your website to give you tips on what to improve for better results.
- Bing Keyword Research Tool - This allows you to check the phrases and keywords that searchers generally type for queries and their corresponding search volumes.
- XML Sitemaps – This helps you create a sitemap that tells the search engine what pages on your website to index.
- Microsoft Bing Blogs – With this, you can find all the latest official updates, deeper insights, technology, trends, people, and best practices when it comes to Bing searches.
- Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit - It gives you an easy way to improve discoverability and user experience for your website(s). Using the robots exclusion, sitemaps and site analysis tools in the Toolkit, you can increase website traffic and enhance the quality of your site.
Key Takeaways:
- Bing takes exact keyword matches and social media shares signals into consideration when it comes to ranking factors, which Google precludes.
- When it comes to the quality and relevance of content, both Google and Bing give it equal importance. So create credible and useful content for your website, and you will be hitting two birds with one stone.
Conclusion:
While Google may remain the top-ranked search engine in the industry right now, with rising concerns about privacy and data usage, there are chances that people may slowly move towards using Bing as many people find it less intrusive compared to Google.
So if you start focusing your efforts on carrying out Bing SEO, within a span of a few weeks to months, you will be able to see positive results and more exposure to a vast number of Bing users.
We understand that juggling between SEO for Google and SEO for Bing can be a bit challenging, which is why we are here for you.
Our team at MyTasker consists of the best SEO professionals and skilled content creators who can strategize and carry out plans to help you with Google SEO and Bing SEO. Be it optimizing your website, creating quality backlinks, or producing good quality content, we can help you with all you need more.
Please feel free to reach out to us with your questions. We would be happy to clarify.
