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
- Age73% are under the age of 45
- Gender44% are female and 56% are male
- Education34% graduated from college
- Income36% have household income in the top 25%
- Marriage54% are married
- Children59% have children living at home
- LGBTQ+3% identify as LGBTQ+
- Disabilities18% 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.
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 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.
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.
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