After Google, Microsoft Bing is the second most used search engine in the world, with 6.1 billion active users a month, many of those who exclusively use the platform (i.e. they don’t use Google). It also powers Yahoo, the third biggest search engine, and AOL. All in all, that’s a big share of the market and means that Bing shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
There’s a tendency when working on SEO to focus on Google. After all, it’s the biggest and most effective search engine by quite a considerable way. And, generally speaking, much of what you do for Google will work for other search engines. But there are certain things you can do to specifically optimise for Bing, and that’s what we’ll be looking at today.
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Why Optimise For Bing?
Bing, though not the most popular search engine out there, nonetheless holds a big chunk of the market. There’s also some evidence to suggest that website traffic obtained from Bing is more valuable, with some studies showing a lower bounce rate and higher number of page views per session.
Google is fairly secretive about its ranking factors, which often leaves you guessing what it actually wants. Much of the SEO best-practices we have developed for Google are down to clever guesswork and extensive studies of results data.
Bing, on the other hand, is more open with this information meaning that, with Bing, you know exactly what to work on to improve your rankings.
There are a number of things Bing actually does more successfully than Google. Video, for example, is better presented on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and the advanced image search is easier to use, offering up better quality results.
Finally, Bing is excellent for voice search. This version of search is constantly growing across the world. One of the most popular voice-assisted AIs, Amazon Alexa, is powered by Bing.
How Bing Ranks Your Website
Like Google, Bing wants to provide users with a positive experience, so most of their ranking factors support this. Lots of information feeds into the search engine results, but the main ones are:
- Relevance: does the content answer a user’s questions and match their search intent?
- Quality & credibility: is the information accurate and from a reputable source?
- User engagement: do users respond well or poorly to the content?
- Freshness: is the information up-to-date?
Location: if the search is locally relevant, is the business physically near the user? - Page load time: does the website fully load in a suitably short time?
While these are mostly similar to Google, Bing’s priorities are different in many respects. Good SEO practices will work across the board, but now we’ll look at some methods that will specifically help your Bing rankings.
How to Optimise for Bing
Claim or List Your Business on Bing Places
Like a Google Business profile, Bing Places is an extremely useful and free tool for local businesses. It helps users find services and products nearby, and provides snapshot information like opening times, contact details and directions. A link to the business website also helps boost traffic.
Make sure your listing is comprehensive, with all sections filled out and your location prominently displayed. As Bing takes information from third-party sources, including Facebook, it’s a good idea to check that you’re ranking in searches on Facebook too. Finally, if you already have a Google Business Profile, you can save time by syncing it with your new Bing Places listing.
Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free resource that can help you improve your site’s performance. Once signed up, you’ll gain access to a host of diagnostic tools that can help you identify search terms, see user behaviour and check the mobile usability of your site. It’s similar to Google’s Analytics but some users may prefer its cleaner and less complex dashboard.
Submit your Sitemap
You may have already submitted your sitemap to Google, but have you done the same in Bing?
The sitemap helps search engines find their way around your site, identify the hierarchy of your pages, see how they’re all connected, and check the timestamps of updates. You can quickly and easily submit your sitemap using Bing Webmaster Tools Sitemap tool.
When creating your sitemap, there are some best practices to help Bing correctly and effectively use it. Many of these will require some technical knowledge, so you may need the help of a developer:
- Use consistent URLs: Bing will only crawl the exact URLs listed.
- Only list canonical URLs, i.e. the one you want search engines to use when you have duplicate or similar content on multiple pages.
- Use the <lastmod> attribute to set the date and time of the latest edit.
- Refer to your sitemap in the Robots.txt file.
Use the hreflang annotation tag to identify the same pages in different languages. - Keep your sitemap to under 50,000 URLs or 50MB (uncompressed) in size. If it’s bigger than this, you should break it down into multiple sitemaps.
Create Helpful and Informative Content For Your Users
Bing likes content that users like so you should always keep your website visitors in mind when creating content. In particular, focus on providing them with enough content to suitably cover a topic, and make sure that it’s unique, useful and answers questions they may have.
Content should also be accessible to all users, which includes those who are using different devices like mobiles and screen readers, which read text out loud.
Focus On On-Page SEO
Backlinks are undoubtedly useful for your Bing rankings, but perhaps not as much as for Google. Instead, focus on on-site SEO.
Though its reliance on them is decreasing, evidence still suggests that Bing prefers exact keyword matches. This means, if someone searches for seeds to sow in spring, your page is more likely to rank if it uses seeds to sow in spring as opposed to flowers to grow in spring. Try using your exact target phrases in headings, URLs, meta descriptions, and body content. However, don’t use phrases in a way that makes the text sound unnatural. Bing can still recognise semantic phrases (different keywords with the same meanings) and spelling errors, and is getting better at this all the time.
Build Your Social Media Presence
Unlike Google, Bing uses information from your social media presence to help decide your website’s position in search, so it’s a good idea to build up a following, remain active, and encourage sharing and user engagement. Make sure that your social media pages all link directly to your website so that Bing knows they’re connected.
However, be warned that your social media activities can also weigh against you. Buying followers or using other immoral tactics to improve your rankings is a big negative signal to the search engine and is likely to send your results plummeting.
Optimise Your Site for Microsoft Edge
While you can use Bing on any browser, Microsoft claims that it works best on Microsoft Edge and will rank your website based on its appearance on that browser. Fortunately, Microsoft has come a long way since the days of Internet Explorer. Edge can now easily hold its own against the likes of Chrome and Firefox.
For the best results in Bing’s rankings, test your website appearance in Edge and make sure it functions as it should.
Conclusion
With over 6 billion monthly users, Bing should be taken seriously as a competitor to Google. It’s well worth your time optimising for Bing as well as Google. Many SEO best-practices for Google are relevant to Bing, but there are a number of additional things you can do to boost your presence on Microsoft’s search engine including boosting social media presence, using exact-match keywords, and claiming your free Bing Places listing.
