Intro
With the market dominance of the Google search engine, people forget the positive impact that Bing can bring in terms of relevant traffic and search results. Bing is like a hidden gem that can turbocharge your SEO and increase relevant traffic to your website.
While most marketers love to work on Google, you can’t afford to ignore Bing, the world’s second most important and widely used search engine.
What is Bing SEO?
Like other search engines, Bing SEO involves optimizing a website to improve its online visibility and rankings on the Bing search engine results page index. While Google still dominates the search space, Bing holds the second largest market share, bolstered by its parent company Microsoft. Bing SEO includes several strategies and relevant techniques to tailor the marketer's requirements for Bing's search algorithm to boost website traffic and promote the chances of higher rankings in Bing SERPs.
Significance and benefits of Bing SEO
In today's market, the**_ _Bing search engine **enhances a website's overall traffic, visibility, and rankings. Including Bing in your SEO activities brings a wide range of benefits.
Transparent ranking factor
The foremost benefit of incorporating Bing SEO is its transparent ranking factors. Compared to Google, Bing has more transparent ranking factors that are widely open for marketers to access and optimize their Bing SEO efforts accordingly. The ranking variables are less obscure, and they revise their rules regularly to help you plan your next step properly.
Great for small businesses
For small and local businesses seeking the best solution, Bing might be a game-changing option. It helps both experienced marketers and beginners who have just commenced their digital marketing journey. As the competition on Google is at its peak, Bing makes the process easy and simplified to rank higher on the SERP, and the advertising cost is much less than Google.
Bing powers Yahoo
Both Bing and Yahoo hold the second and fourth rank in the top search engines list, according to GlobalStats. Since 2009, Bing has had the edge over the Yahoo search engine, so if you optimize well for Bing, you will eventually get relevant results on Yahoo.
Source: GlobalStats
Less competition
Using Bing as your primary search engine may give you a competitive edge since numerous marketers ignore Bing SEO optimization. With this, you can tick all your query boxes and get a higher spot than Google. If you need help with your visibility on Google, you can easily make the most of Bing as you continue establishing your domain and brand over the web.
Bing AI with GPT
Now, the Bing search engine is powered by smart AI search, so you can easily ask detailed queries to prompt responses from chatbots. This move grabbed marketers' attention and helped Bing achieve new heights of success.
How is Bing different from Google?
Bing differs from Google in a number of ways that can affect how you carry out Bing-specific SEO.
| Ranking Factors | Bing | |
| Keywords | Bing primarily focuses on precise keywords that a user seeks and likes to rank your site if it fulfills its purpose; Bing goes for a more sophisticated approach. | Google employs a semantic search strategy. That is, they examine the search intent and context of the keyword and closely monitor related keywords. |
| Backlinks | Bing favors promoting higher quality backlinks over bulky backlinks and excellent domain age. If you have a great domain age with higher authority links, they will boost your rankings. | Google values backlinks as much as Bing. But Google builds more trust in Page Rank of a domain, establishing the link. Furthermore, Google values your website more if it has high-authority links to your content. |
| Social Signals | Bing explicitly admits that social networking is a ranking element. Bing views a well-influenced social media outlet favorably and prioritizes it in search results. | Google won’t explicitly state that social signals play a significant role in page ranking. They see social media as a great option to attract users and turn them into organic traffic to the website, which indirectly assists in ranking higher. But they do not reference it as a direct ranking factor. |
| Crawling | Bing crawls pages less often and focuses mostly on crucial pages. | Google usually relies on complete indexing and crawling each page on your website. |
| Multimedia | Bing can crawl and interpret a wide range of multimedia information. When Flash became widespread, Bing could crawl and index the site. | Multimedia also matters for Google, but less than in Bing, as they generally rely on text-based Content. |
Understanding Bing’s ranking factors and algorithm
Bing's algorithm is quite different from Google's search engine as Bing heavily relies on machine learning and other chatbots, not that Google doesn't. Still, Bing has the upper hand. Let's get to know the ranking factors Bing usually considers while ranking a web page or website.
Relevancy
Bing looks an inch closer at how the content on your webpage matches the search query. It considers numerous factors like content duplication, spamminess, readability, and engagement.
Credibility
Bing says that it looks at the website and the writer's reputation to determine the credibility of the website. And it demotes content that violates the content guidelines.
User experience
The user experience on a page is a relevant ranking factor for Bing. They fix their eyes on how users are getting friendly with the search engine results. Bing also considers a range of factors to analyze the user experience. These include click thru rate, time spent on site, and search query adjustments.
Highly appealing content
Bing recommends and crawls fresh, genuine, and human-written content, favoring newly published or user-appealing evergreen content for excellent page rankings.
Page load time
Bing loves it when a website loads faster, as it gives a much better experience to an end-user. Low page speed can indicate to the search engine that your site might need to be more UX-friendly.
Tips to rank higher on Bing
Use these Bing SEO techniques to ensure your content is highly optimized for the search engine and boost your possibility of ranking on the first page and landing the coveted #1 spot.
Conduct Bing-specific keyword research
The best step is to conduct relevant keyword research, which includes numerous factors such as finding profitable keywords, Using Bing's keyword research tool, and optimizing keywords in the content.
On-page optimization for Bing
Includes activities like optimizing meta tags, fixing header tags, and optimizing content. Internal linking of web pages also came under this.
Local SEO for Bing
Its main objective is to target local optimization of the keywords so that the Bing search engines can crawl the pages accordingly. You can use a range of tools including Bing Local packs, Bing Places for Business, local keywords optimisation, and online reputation management.
What are Bing Webmaster SEO tools?
Bing Webmaster Tools refer to a set of free tools offered by Microsoft that assist webmasters, website admins, marketers and designers. Such tools assist people with the site performance factors like inserting websites into the Bing index crawler, analyzing backlinks and managing keywords.
Furthermore, the Bing webmaster tools can easily track website performance and presence. Such tools are equivalent to GSC (Google's Search Console). Following are some of the major areas of the webmaster services that may come in handy:
- Determine which keywords (and where) your website or webpage ranks for
- Keep an eye on Bing's crawling and indexing functions
- Upload fresh Content to the crawler (web pages/websites)
- Remove Content that does not need to be crawled
- Take away link support
- Monitor and eliminate potential viruses and spam
Tools for efficient Bing SEO
There are plenty of tools available in the market that help marketers do their job hassle-free. Some of these include:
The Bing ranking algorithm is significantly different from its prominent rivals. To enhance your rating on the result pages, create substantial material based on current subjects and focus on the meta, keywords, and graphics. If you're a first-time SEO user worried about the process, consider hiring a professional SEO specialist to help you.
