In this Bing SEO guide, I will explain why you shouldn’t ignore Bing SEO and how you can increase your traffic there. There will also be a tabular comparative study between Google and Bing search engines. You’ll also learn how to use those differences to form a strong SEO strategy.
Bing is one of the most underutilized lead generation channels and if used well, it can give a boost to your business. This is the easiest and quickest guide to bing SEO. Here’s is what all you’ll find –
Let’s dive in to see if you know enough about Bing and why is it the right time to stop ignoring it.
What is Bing Search Engine?
Google is the most popular search engine. No doubt about that! 63,000 searches happen on it every second.
With the biggest share it has got, nobody even stands close to it.
Bing is still fighting hard and can manage space for itself.
To get back to the point, Bing is a search engine by Microsoft. It was earlier known as Windows Live Search or MSN search.
More than 5 million downloads of the app have happened which implies people are using it.
Is Your Target Market on Bing?
Chances are very high that they are. 6 billion monthly searches are happening on Bing.
Many of those searches must be related to your business area.
Here’s a shocking fact:
66 million industrial searches are reached specifically on Bing and not on Google. Share on X
If you’re a B2B marketer, you’re losing a lot by not being on Bing.
Here are other demographic details of Bing users –
- 43% are married
- 45 – 54 (20%) is the main age group followed by 35 – 44 (18%). Mainly older demographic is present
- One-third of the Bing users have a household income of more than $100k
- Most of them are educated.
Before we move further in this quickest guide to bing SEO, let’s first understand what is SEO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a way of optimizing or making changes to your websites so it starts gaining more visibility and showing higher on the search engines.
These changes are done mainly to give a better search experience to a user.
The Thing To Always Remember
There should be a match between what a user is searching for and what you have to offer.
All your SEO efforts will go fruitless if these two don’t match.
What is Bing SEO?
Bing SEO is search engine optimization done for the search engine, Bing.
This implies improving your website to get a higher ranking on the Bing search engine for relevant searches.
It’s a way of increasing the quality of traffic to your website.
How is Bing Search Engine Different From Google Search Engine?
Before I tell you how your Bing SEO strategy is going to be different from your Google strategy, we need to understand first what makes Bing unique.
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- Google came into existence in 1997, more than 20 years ago.
- Google owns a 91.54% market share.
- Google provides a not-so-great video search. The thumbnails are small.
- Google provides a better shopping search. You will find accurate best pricing online.
- ‘People Also Ask’ appears at the top.
- Google provides more information related to popular books, movies, video games like a movie release date. Google provides better smart searches.
- Only one search engine.
- Google provides facts and data from mainly one source.
Bing
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- Microsoft launched its search engine in 1998 but it has gone through a lot of changes since then.
- Bing owns a 5% market share. The noteworthy thing here is that it owns a 24% market share for desktop searches and 33% market share for searches originating in the US.
- Bing undoubtedly provides better video search. Bigger thumbnails are shown. You are not even required to leave Bing and you can watch a video preview right there.
- Bing’s smart search is not so perfect. But they can predict ticket price changes very well.
- ‘People Also Ask’ shows at the bottom.
- Bing still has a long way to go in this area.
- Bing is made up of three search engines – Bing, Yahoo & AOL
- Bing provides summarized data from various sources rather than just one.
How is Bing SEO Strategy Different From Google SEO Strategy?
If you understand the differences between how both search engines work and rank, you will be able to better optimize your SEO strategy for them.
Here are the most useful differences you need to know for planning your Bing SEO strategy –
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- Google favors engaging and fresh content. This is one of the factors for ranking pages higher.
- Additionally, Google ranks even internal pages like your blog.
- This is no secret but Google doesn’t like hidden content and it hurts your ranking if you have one.
- Social is not of much value to Google.
- A big no for flash content.
- The meta description is generally not too long. Most of the text there gets cropped up if longer than required.
- No such functionality on Google.
- It has become very saturated.
- All your competitors are there on Google which makes their keywords tougher to acquire, making CPC (Cost per click) very high.
Bing
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- Bing prefers old & authoritative pages over fresh pages.
- Bing ranks mainly on your home page.
- Bing doesn’t differentiate between hidden and non-hidden content and both are ranked.
- Social matters for Bing. It’s one of the ranking factors.
- Bing likes engaging in flashy content and can read more than just text.
- The meta description shown in Bing searches is much longer than what we normally see on Google searches.
- The top result shows other related articles by that website.
- It has got a higher click-through rate for ads
- Less competition is responsible for the low cost per click.
Is Bing the Same As Google?
The two main points that make Bing the same as Google are –
1. Big Brands Rank Higher
The reason they rank higher is that they have higher authority, high-quality backlinks, and attract engaging traffic.
2. Backlinks Matter
Backlinks matter on both the search engines.
Google and Bing both like high-quality authoritative backlinks to a website largely if those links are coming from .edu or .gov domain names.
Read: Paid Backlinks Can Mess With Your Ranking. (The Curse Of Paid Backlinks)
Why is Bing SEO Important?
More than 24% of the desktop searches are happening on Bing.
This suggests that Bing has a huge potential for driving traffic to your website.
That’s why I also like to call it a forgotten lead generation channel.
Not just desktop searches, 33% of the searches in the USA happen on Bing.
If the USA has your target audience, you should get serious about Bing SEO.
Bing is still the second most popular search engine in many big countries.
51 million retail searches happen in retail. This is just data from one industry.
The most popular industries on Bing are retail, finances, technology, travel, education, and so on.
Bing users also show less bounce rate which means that chances that they are going to leave your website because they didn’t find something or were just unsatisfied are considerably lower.
How to Rank Higher On Bing? 8 Bing SEO Guide Tips
Are you trying to get a higher ranking on Bing for your website? The Bing SEO tips and tricks shared below can help-
1. Titles are Important
You should pay attention to the titles of your web pages. They can make you discoverable on the Bing search engine.
Read: A Complete Content Marketing Guide
Why are titles important for Bing SEO?
Page titles help Bing in understanding what your page is all about.
They are the first impression of your webpage and you should make it the best.
Also, page titles can make or break your web page SEO.
If your page title can convey the right message to your user and can develop their interest without them clicking on it, you have won the web traffic.
Moreover, page titles also show up in the browser tabs which helps in building a stronger connection of that keyword with your company.
Page titles are shown when people share that on their social media profiles. An interesting page title can bring you more traffic even from the social media channels.
Put the most important word first in the title.
Make sure it is benefit-oriented if you want to attract more traffic.
What can you do to make your titles SEO-friendly?
Use your keywords in your page titles.
Make sure that the page title and page content are conveying the same idea.
Keep the number of words low in your page title. Aim for 60 characters and not more than that.
As important as they, don’t overstuff your page titles with keywords.
It will only end up making you look like a spammer rather than a website of authority.
2. Home Page is Your Key
Your home page is the page that will be mainly ranked by Bing.
So, remember to pay extra attention to it. Make sure it is optimized so it can be easily found by Bing.
3. Equally Focus on Social
It may not be an important criterion for deciding rank on Google, but it is very important for Bing.
Social media signals are principal ranking factors or Bing.
They take into account how many a link has been retweeted or shared on social media.
Information for Bing’s knowledge graph is also pulled from Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels.
It shows the followers’ numbers, recent tweets, and posts as well.
Time to start taking your social media marketing very seriously now.
Twitter follower ratings of different businesses also show up in the results.
4. Remember Mobile Optimization
Even if Bing owns a bigger share of desktop searches than mobile searches.
Still, that doesn’t make mobile optimization any less important. It’s good to always remember that mobile browsing is the trend we are seeing.
People are spending more and more time on their mobile phones these days rather than on their laptops.
No search engines will promote pages that have tiny buttons, big banners, and invisible font on their mobile website.
They aim to provide a better search engine experience to their users and mobile experience is equally vital for that.
That is the reason that you should start taking mobile optimization and mobile SEO more seriously.
5. Target Exact Keywords
Even though Google has started understanding the meaning of a user’s searches and show results according to that.
Bing still focuses on showing exact search results. So, you should focus on using a lot of exact keywords here. Semantic search
Although Google has started understanding the meaning of a user search and started paying attention to semantics, Bing still focuses on the exact keywords.
6. Meta Keywords are Alive
Even though the importance of meta keywords has died on Google, it’s still very much alive on Bing.
Bing ranks those domains higher which have exact matching keywords as the search.
It’s time to bring those meta keywords again for your website if you are trying to optimize your website for Bing SEO.
7. Focus on Backlinks Quality
Just like Google, quality backlinks matter even for Bing SEO. Paid and spammy links can harm your ranking.
The main difference between how Google and Bing use backlinks as ranking factors is that link count also matters on Bing but not on Google.
What kinds of links matter on Bing?
Bing still counts anchor text with your keyword as a good link. Searchmetrics has found that 53% of Bing’s top 30 search results have anchor texts.
Social links count as good backlinks as well.
Links from an old and authoritative website carry the highest value.
Also, links from the older websites will outweigh links from newer websites.
Moreover, links from .gov, .edu and .org are very important.
8. Content is Not King
Even if the content is not the king on Bing like it’s on Google. This doesn’t suggest that content is not at all a priority for ranking higher on Bing. Bing just understands and judges content differently than Google.
How is content quality determined on Bing?
According to Bing Guidelines, they decide ranking based on three important factors –
Authority: Can we trust this content? It also included the authority of the domain, social signals, and the kind of backlinks it has got.
Utility: Is the content valuable and has sufficient details? It checks how useful the content on your webpage is for the users.
Presentation: Is the content well presented, easy to read, and easy to navigate? It checks where you have placed ads on your website. Ad placement should never make browsing your website tougher for your users.
Key Takeaway: Bing SEO Guide
The data is telling us that Bing still exists and many users are still using it for searching their queries.
We have to go in the direction this data is taking us and start realizing the importance of Bing for increasing our website traffic.
Even though both the search engines are very similar, there are still a few things that set them apart from each other.
And we have to use those differences to customize our SEO strategy according to the targeted search engine.
We can’t have one SEO strategy and expect to see the same results. So here it is, the quickest guide to bing SEO.
It was a fun read, wasn’t it?
- What have you noticed about your search engine ranking on Bing?
- Are you doing any kind of SEO for Bing?
- What have you learned from your experience?
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