Have you started optimizing your own and your clients' websites for search engines? And you're doing everything you can to get your website to the top of the search engine results page, or should I say GOOGLE search engine results page. Is there a difference????
You're probably thinking, "Yes, we perform SEO to get our website to the top of Google," right? However, despite Google's dominance in the Search Engine Race, we still have a lot of ground to cover.
Yes, BING. Bing, a Microsoft Search Engine, is the second most popular search engine. Why don't we consider our website to rank on Bing Search Engines as well, given that this is the second highest ranking?
First, let’s understand some statistics,
- As per September 2021, online search engine Bing accounted for nearly 7 percent of the global search market.(Statistica)
- Almost a third of desktop searches in the US are done through Bing. (Statista)
- The number of worldwide visits to Bing.com peaked in June 2021 with 1.84 billion unique global visitors
Bing is the world's second most popular search engine, with 2.86 percent of the total market share. So, while we try to leave our footprints on all Social Media platforms to click first in our users’ mind, why not be on all search engines??
That seems fair.
Hence, in this article, I will cover everything you need to know about BING SEO. From Why SEO for Bing is important to How to do SEO on Bing?
Is traffic from Bing Valuable?
One of the most crucial skills in all of Digital Marketing is Search Engine Optimization. Being organic, on the other hand, is a lengthy process. You would assume that investing time and resources in Bing SEO is pointless because Bing Search Engine only accounts for 1.12 percent of mobile traffic in the United States, but if you look at the stats, Bing sees about 900 million searches each day, which is a huge count. (URL)Now to see more such reasons why Traffic from Bing is valuable and why we should do SEO for Bing, let's have a look at below metrics
- Most of the Users who use Bing as their Search Engine are high earners. Means almost One third earn $1,00,000. That means businesses who sell luxury items and household items, provide construction services, and Bing SEO should be in their priority list.
- Another interesting research says that almost 70% of users are more than 35 years old, which means you should always do SEO on Bing if your target audience is above 35.
- Bing gets traffic from many countries like the US, Canada, China, UK, Germany, Japan. And now if you want to expand your business in the international market, then Bing SEO for you.
All above points should be convincing enough to opt for Bing Search Engine to rank your website.
Bing SEO Ranking Factor
What comes to mind first when we consider putting in some extra effort and executing Bing SEO?Factors, to be sure! Of course, we can't begin BING SEO without first understanding certain Ranking Factors.
Here is the list of Bing SEO Factors:
I will start with On-page SEO Ranking Factor and Technical Ranking Factors. Bing Webmaster, on the other hand, has provided a comprehensive guide on their ranking criteria. I'm going to share a handful of the most significant ones with you.
Bing SEO Ranking Factor: On-page and Technical SEO
Sitemap: Sitemap is as important in Bing SEO as in Google Search Engines. It helps search engines crawl your website thoroughly and clearly. Bing will crawl your website without a Sitemap, however due to the structure of your website, some URLs may be unable to be crawled and indexed. We give all of the URls, as well as content such as images and videos, in the Sitemap. This helps Bing determine what information is important for your website, ensuring that it gets crawled completely. Bing accepts Sitemaps in the following formats: XML, RSS, mRSS, Atom 1.0, and plain text.
Make your sitemap available to Bing by:
- Submitting it to Bing using the Bing Webmaster Tools Sitemap tool
- Inserting the following line in the robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap:
Bing will crawl your sitemap on a regular basis once it has been identified; there is no need to submit it again unless there is a big site change.
HTML Tags:
HTML Tags: Just like Google, Bing also prefers HTML tags, so make sure our HTML tags are descriptive and specific.
- Title Tags: Your Title of every page should be specific and relevant to the content of the page
- Meta Description: Meta Description appears in the Search Engine Result Page right after your Title and URL. It helps users understand what your webpage is about and is one of the most important ranking factors of Bing SEO. Meta Description should be descriptive enough.
- Meta Robots – Meta Robots Tags are tags that inform Search Engine how to crawl and index a page. If you don’t want crawlers to crawl or follow the URL on a particular web page you can use No Follow Meta Robots.
- a href tag – specifies the URL linking to another page. If you want to link to another part in the same page use the #tag.
- <img src> tag – This basically informs where the image has come from.
- alt attributes –In Bing SEO, image seo and optimization is important. Through Alt attributes, you can give details about the image.
- <H1> tag – H1 tag is a main heading and helps Bing understand the topic of the content more clearly.
- <H1>-<H6> Header tags – Define the structure of your page and help Bing understand the content of each paragraph.
- <P> tag –This is a paragraph tag. This helps Bing understand that particular set of content id paragraphs.
- <TABLE> tag – Use <TABLE><TH> etc. for data tables.
- Secondary content (CSS, JavaScript): Allow crawlers to crawl all of your CSS Stylesheet and JavaScript files in your robots.txt file. Limit the use of dynamic resource loading – i.e. AJAX – to reduce the number of http requests and the use of JavaScript on huge websites.
- Use Schema.org, RDFa, or OpenGraph Semantic Markup to convey the information about the pages. In either JSON-LD or Microdata format, Schema.org is preferred. Note that while semantic markup may enable the use of Bing rich features, it does not guarantee that they will be used.
Content: Content is the King and this applies everywhere. Be it SEO for Google or Bing SEO, a website gets ranked which has the content that users are looking for. For, Bing your content should be relevant to the query, it should have credibility and quality, freshness.
Load Time: If your website has slow page speed so for Bing it would be poor user experience. It may make your user go to some other site to see the information. Make sure your website speed is high.
Location: Location: In ranking results Bing considers where the user is located (country and city), where the page is hosted, the language of the page, or the location of other visitors to the page.
Bing SEO Ranking Factor: Off-Page SEO
Link Building: Link building is one of the best practices to be a trusted website for Bing Search Engine. Just like Google, Bing also does not prefer any buying link. So, make sure you are creating links for Bing SEO to the relevant websites and getting links from trustworthy sites only.These are some ranking factors, for detailed guidelines, you can read the Bing Webmaster Guideline.
How to do SEO for Bing?
- Create High-Quality Backlinks: Bing SEO prioritises backlink quality over quantity. According to their criteria, a few high-quality backlinks are sufficient to improve your website's rating. As a result, it's preferable to build backlinks on reputable and high-quality sites. Reciprocal, Buy, and Spammy connections are all types of links that can lower your website's credibility and ranking.
- On-page SEO: We recognise that we have power over on-page SEO. For improved exposure and ranking traffic, we should always use on-page SEO for Bing. Use of all HTML tags such as Title, Meta Description, and H tags, URL Structure, Internal Linking, Content, Images, and Image SEO are examples of on-page SEO activities.
- Domain Name: Unlike Google, Bing still believes in a domain that is SEO friendly. You may always purchase Keyword Related Domain if you want to build your business on Bing and rank better. This will have an impact on your Bing SEO ranking. As you can see in the example below:
- When we type in SEO agency in Canada, it returns results with an identical match domain.
- Use of precise keywords in H Tags: You can use exact keywords in H tags like H1 and H2 just like you can have exact keyword match domains. This will also help you with your BIng SEO.
- Use of Schema Markup: Schema markup and Structured Data give search engines more information about web pages. This allows search engines to better comprehend your website and rank it accordingly.
- Social Media: Yes, it's no surprise that Bing encourages social media presence when it comes to SEO for Bing. Users are actively engaged with you and searching for you on social media, indicating that your brand and website are trustworthy.
These are some tips you can use to do SEO on Bing Search Engines.
Free Tools and Resources for Bing SEO
Tools and plugins are the integral parts of our SEO journey. Be it On-page SEO, Technical SEO, Link Building, Site Auditing, Competitor Analysis, Keyword Research. We need SEO tools at every stage of our SEO journey. So,how Bing can’t have tools for us.Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tool
Just like Google has Google Search Console to understand How Google sees our website, and check issues if our website has queries from where our website is getting clicks and from where our website is getting links. Bing also has a tool for Bing SEO and that is Bing Webmaster Tool.There are various metrics Bing Webmaster can help us with for analyzing our website metrics. Here are some of the features:
1. Search Performance: The most important metric of our website. Number of views, clicks, CTR, position, impression. You can drill down to see the data in more detail. You can easily see changes in performance. The only thing that it doesn't have is a filter option.
2. URL Inspection: After doing all SEO activities, we need Bing to crawl and index it, right. So, through the URL inspection tool you can check URLs, if it has been indexed or if there is any issue. You can also check the Live URL.
Recently, Bing has launched an IndexNow feature, so whenever you create some new content or make changes, you can immediately inform Bing that you have made changes for instant indexing.
3. Site Explorer: This feature of Bing Webmaster Tool is what makes it outstanding. This allows you to see your website as the Search Engine sees it. You can see each URL separately and can find if there is any opportunity for improvements.
4. XML Sitemap: Sitemap has a good impact on Bing SEO as it allows search engines to understand which of the content is important. XML Sitemap tool in webmaster tool helps you resubmit, remove and download the Sitemap.
5. Keyword Research: If you want to look for an overview of keywords, then the Keyword research tool from Bing Webmaster is quite useful. As because of low search volume, it doesn’t have extensive reports nor have the long-tail keywords metrics.
6. Backlinks: Backlink tool for BING SEO provides the basic details like number of backlinks and from which website your website is getting backlinks.
7. SEO Report: Bing Webmaster Tool SEO report is good enough if you are starting out with SEO as this provides you the data and issues it gathers while crawling and indexing your website.
Apart from the Bing webmaster tool, there are many third-party tools that can be used to improve Bing SEO performance, Like Ahrefs Bing Keyword Research Tool.
Bing SEO v/s Google SEO
Be it Google or Bing or any other Search Engines. There is no way that your website will rank overnight and get huge traffic from day one. SEO requires a lot of effort and patience. Those efforts can be different for each search engine. Likewise, there are few differences between the SEO practices for Google and Bing, and why are we comparing only two as these two are the biggest competitors.
1. So, the basic difference between Bing and Google SEO is that while Google focuses on the context of keywords mainly there Bing focuses on the preciseness of the keywords.
2. Another key difference between the two is that Bing gives Social Media preference more than Google does.
3. Another important difference between these two search engines is that Bing rewards the website that has more multimedia like photos and videos than Google.
These are some key differences between Google and Bing SEO. While ranking your website on any search engine you can choose the best practices as per the search engine preferences.
Some Last Words:
Every search engine has its own uniqueness and the one thing common is that all are getting you quality users and conversion. Plan your SEO strategy and start working. SEO is a long term process, so with patience wait for magic to get started.
Post a Comment