Bing SEO Optimization: A Comprehensive Guide to Improve Your Website’s Performance

A complete SEO guide to optimizing a website for Bing's search engine, detailing various techniques and strategies to improve its performance and visibility.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we search and find information online. Bing Microsoft’s search engine is leveraging AI to deliver more relevant, personalized and engaging results to its users. As a result Bing is gaining popularity and market share.

Despite Google’s dominance in search engines, alternatives are out there. Understanding Bing SEO techniques can help you get more traffic to your content.

Bing SEO is the practise of optimising a website to boost its visibility and ranks on the Bing search engine. While Bing and Google use similar techniques to generate search engine results pages (SERPs), there are significant variations in terms of ranking factors, keyword search volumes, indexing priority, SERP features, and SEO tools.

The goal of Digital Marketing tactics is creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract and engage your target audience, whether organically or through paid adverts.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tactics can make your website stand out in search engine rankings.

Optimizing for Bing SEO provides an incredible opportunity to reach a surprisingly large and diverse audience, particularly in industries like financial services, retail, and technology. The optimization tactics used for Bing are similar to those used for Google, with the primary focus being on-page optimisation, keywords, and backlinks. Furthermore, both Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana use Bing for voice search, so it is important to take Bing seriously if you want to thrive in the voice search game.

Because everyone is chasing Google, Bing has less competition and a 9.19 percent of the global desktop search market as of July 2023, while market leader Google had a share of around 83.49 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s market share was 2.72 percent.

While this may appear to be a small percentage in comparison to Google’s 83.49 percent, Bing’s desktop search market has risen by 35.33 percent since July 2020 (6.43 percent). And it keeps growing.

Google is the most frequently used search engine worldwide. But in some countries, its’ alternatives are leading or competing with it to some extent. As of the third quarter of 2022, more than 62 percent of internet users in Russia used Yandex, whereas Google users were nearly 36 percent. In China, Baidu was the most used search engine as of December 2021, with nearly 86 percent of internet users in the country accessing it.

In other countries, like Japan and Mexico, people tend to use Yahoo along with Google. In the first quarter of 2022 nearly 56 percent of the respondents in Japan said that they had used Yahoo in the past four weeks. In the same year, over 27 percent of users in Mexico said they used Yahoo. Another search engine, Bing, operated by Microsoft, was the second most popular search engine in the United Kingdom after Google.

Bing SEO Advantages

Lower Competition

When compared to Google, Bing has less competition, which means that optimising your website for Bing SEO might provide you an edge in ranking higher on Bing’s search results page.

Different Ranking Factors

While many of the key principles of SEO apply to both Google and Bing, ranking factors differ. On-page SEO, exact keyword matches, user experience, quality content, and getting quality backlinks from high authority websites are all priorities for Bing.

Bing’s User Base

Bing has a significant user base, particularly in major markets like the Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, US, and UK. Neglecting to optimize for Bing could result in missing out on potential traffic and customers.

What’s the typical Bing’s user profile? According to Bing Vertical market segments 54% use search engines for online product research and 37% use search engines for brand discovery.

All demographics

• 73%
  Age
  73% are under the age of 45
• 44%
  Gender
  44% are female and 56% are male
• 34%
  Education
  34% graduated from college
• 36%
  Income
  36% have household income in the top 25%
• 54%
  Marriage
  54% are married
• 59%
  Children
  59% have children living at home
• 3%
  LGBTQ+
  3% identify as LGBTQ+
• 18%
  Disabilities
  18% report having a disability

All of this leads to the conclusion that Bing is remarkably popular, particularly in the United States. SEO efforts for Bing include many of the same aspects that are important for Google, allowing it to reach its target audience with minimal effort.

Bing Powers Other Search Engines

Optimising for Bing can also help your website’s exposure on other Bing-powered search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, Yahoo!, Ecosia, and Qwant.

Voice Search and Microsoft Products

Bing is the default search engine for voice assistants such as Alexa and Cortana, and it is also incorporated into a number of Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office and Xbox. Optimising for Bing can help you enhance your voice search exposure and target customers who use Microsoft products.

In addition to the traditional way of searching, Microsoft introduced Bing Chat.

Bing chat is a feature of Microsoft’s search engine. It is an AI-powered chatbot that can help you with your queries and searches. You can ask questions, compare products, summarise documents, and more in the Bing Chat in Microsoft Edge sidebar or in the Web-based Bing Chat.

Ranking Factors for Bing SEO

On-Page SEO

On-page optimisation is very important to Bing. It is important to align meta tags, headings, URLs, and content with relevant keywords.

We recommend articles called Create perfect H1 heading for SEO and Accessibility and Best practices for writing good alt text.

Exact Keyword Matches

Bing prioritises exact keyword matches over Google. Exact keyword matches in titles, headings, and content can help you rank higher on Bing.

User Experience

User experience is a significant ranking factor for Bing. Bing rankings can be influenced by factors such as website load speed, mobile friendliness, and site architecture. We recommend to read Help Bing understand your pages and strongly use Schema Semantic Markup (JSON LD). Read more about What is JSON LD? Frequently asked questions.

Quality Content

Bing seeks rich, useful, and interesting content created for users rather than search engines. By creating clear, distinctive, high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-find content on your website, you will boost the likelihood of Bing indexing and presenting your content in search results.

Make content accessible and easy to navigate for all site visitors. Screen readers, for example, should be tested for usability. Listening to your content rather than looking at it may be eye-opening and can assist you in determining the accuracy and quality of the alt text for videos and images. Usability testing may also assist identify issues and problems with your website’s navigation, reading order, table markup, and form elements.

Ensure your HTML element (semantic HTML) and alt attributes are descriptive, specific, and accurate. This includes creating unique title for each web page as well as image alt text that accurately describes the image in question.

Backlinks

Getting valuable backlinks from high authority websites can have a positive impact on Bing rankings. You can use Bing Backlink Tool to get information about your site’s backlink profile, including the aggregated count of referring pages, referring domains and anchor texts detected by Bing.

Social signals

Bing places more emphasis on social media signals and sees strong social signals as an indicator of relevance and popularity. Bing uses social media signals to understand brand credibility and user engagement. Therefore, if you want to rank higher on Bing, you should optimise your content for social media platforms and encourage your audience to share it.

Multimedia

Bing is great at understanding and indexing multimedia content. Here are some of the main points in relation to Bing and Google:

• Google has a larger index size than Bing, which means it can crawl and store more web pages.
• Bing offers more advanced options for image search, such as layout, color, style, and filter.
• Bing also has a feature that allows you to remove specific parts of your search terms with one click.
• When searching for videos on Bing, you can enjoy previews and expedite searching for the desired content.
• When you click on a video on Bing, it suggests related queries and arranges the videos for easy scrolling.
• Google has a smoother interface for image search and takes you to the full-size image in a single click.

Indicating decorative images with empty alt text

Bing indicates an image with an empty alt attribute as an error.

To inform Bing Webmaster Tools that an image’s alt text is empty because it’s decorative, you can use the data-decorative attribute in the image’s HTML tag, like this: <img src="image-url" data-decorative="true" alt="">.

This will signal to Bing that the image is decorative and should not be indexed or used for search purposes.

IndexNow technology

IndexNow is a new protocol developed by Microsoft, Bing, and Yandex that allows websites to easily notify search engines when new, updated, or removed material is added to their website.

Once search engines are notified of changes, they quickly crawl and reflect website changes in their index and search results by using an API. This protocol was designed to manage the pain of website owners who struggled to have search engines quickly recognise and assess their most recent website improvements. By telling search engines that a URL has changed, website owners provide a clear signal that helps search engines prioritise crawl for these URLs, reducing the need for exploratory crawls to determine whether the content has changed. Search engines want to limit crawling of websites that use IndexNow in the future.

If you are a developer, you can quickly set up IndexNow by creating a key that is protocol-compatible using Microsoft Bing’s online key generation tool. You may then host the key in a text file named with the key’s value at the root of your website and begin sending URLs when new, updated, or deleted URLs are added, updated, or removed. If you are not a developer, several big platforms have accepted or plan to implement IndexNow, so there will be nothing you need to do once they have.

Bing URL Submissions WordPress Plugin

The Bing URL Submission WordPress Plugin automates the submission of URLs from WordPress sites to the Bing index. The plugin detects page creation/updates in WordPress and automatically submits the URL behind the scenes, ensuring that the site pages are always fresh in the Bing index, once installed and set with an API key obtained from the Bing Webmaster portal.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing provides a suite of tools known as Bing Webmaster Tools that can assist website owners in improving their Bing SEO. These tools enable you to analyse your site’s performance, get access to free SEO tools, and gain insights to boost your page ranks on Bing search results.

An example of a benefit

Your content might be a good source of knowledge for Bing.

See an example for the question: how to hide text but make it accessible for screen reader.

Bing provides the source and in this case it is definitely a promotion for you.

Bing common issues and potential solutions

The site’s favicon is not displayed in Bing search results

Try following steps:

• Add a favicon.ico file in the root directory where your website is located.
• Generate correct favicons using Favicon Generator. We recommend to use SVG Favicon Generator.

Why is the website not ranked on Bing?

Each searching engine, including Bing, have its own ranking factors. However, here are few steps to check why your site is not ranked in Bing.

• Use keywords on your website: Include popular keywords or phrases on your website. These words may be included in page titles, content, or even the name of the image file you are using. Anything people type into a search engine might be called a keyword or phrase.

  Be careful not to excessively use keywords. This may have a negative impact on your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Ensure that your text still reads naturally.

• Refresh your page content often: Add new content to your website frequently, ideally weekly. This could be adding information about a new product or service you’re selling, a customer story or product video. It is also essential to refresh your online content pages at least every six months and eliminate stuff that is no longer useful.

  Refreshing your content encourages search engines to visit your site more frequently. The more often people visit, the faster they will find freshly published content on your website. You may also see some ranking benefits.

• Gain links from other websites: When rating your web page, search engines consider which other websites link to it as well as your entire website. Links from other websites are interpreted by search engines as a vote of confidence in your content’s accuracy, relevance, and usefulness. Note that this case is also called inbound links – links that come from another site to your own website.

  However, not all links are considered equally. Links from highly credible websites are given more weight than those from less respectable sites. Typically, the more links your website receives from reliable websites, the higher it will rank.

• Include the meta description tag: The meta description element, while not usually visible in search engine results, informs a search engine about the content of your page. It is also an excellent opportunity to inform customers about what is on your page. Search engines use the description to determine how relevant your page is and how they will rank it. The greater the relevance of your material, the higher it will rank.

  Remember that search engines may modify how they use your content (including descriptions) to generate search results. Check search engine websites on a frequent basis to see if you need to change your content.

Final words

While Bing SEO has its own set of rules, many of the recommended practices for Google SEO apply to Bing as well. Both search engines prioritise high-quality information and a positive user experience. To boost your website’s visibility on Google and Bing, it’s best to focus on providing quality content, optimising on-page components, and developing authoritative backlinks. We recommend to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

Remember that conducting SEO-related work does not guarantee higher ranks or site performance, but it can increase the chances of your website being attractive to Bing’s search algorithms.