If Bing is treated as a step in your digital marketing circles, you may be missing out on the greatest untapped opportunity for your business.
Some tend to forget that there are other search engines than Google, but Bing can be a great place to gain visibility online.
Bing and Yahoo (which have been operated by Bing since 2010) together control 9.97% of market share of desktop search engines in the United States
More importantly, many marketers have noticed that Bing traffic converts better than Google traffic.
This may have to do with Bing’s average demographic being more mature and arguably having more money to spend.
Bing also partners with dozens of other search engines, including Yahoo! , AOL, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, MSN, and Lycos.
In short, if you’re not searching on Google, you’re probably using a search experience powered in part by Bing.
This doesn’t include voice search (Alexa and Cortana both use Bing) and the fact that Bing is built into most Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office and Xbox, too.
The good news is that if you’re already invested in Google SEO, you’re just a hop, skip, and jump away from seeing tangible results on other search engines, too. That’s because Bing and Google share many of the same ranking signals.
However, there is The main differences Between SEO for Google and Bing – and you’ll learn about those here.
1. Keywords
While Bing announced in 2014 that they no longer consider meta keywords for ranking purposes, search engines like Yandex and Baidu still do.
Google has improved search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and interpreting contextual signals from different websites.
We call this semantic search, and it relies in part on machine learning and artificial intelligence (such as RankBrain) to help them understand the content of a page.
Google said RankBrain is the third most important factor in its ranking algorithm. This means that exact match keywords don’t matter as much as creating comprehensive topic pages and articles for your visitors.
Bing has been catching up when it comes to broad match keywords.
they Webmaster Guidelines We recommend that you “develop rich content based on keyword research that shows what users are searching for with the information they are looking for”.
Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines explain how keywords can help you rank. Bing will not rule out this possibility Using the meta keyword tag (which Google ignores).
Now, this doesn’t give you an excuse to misuse them or start stuffing unrelated keywords into your meta tag. But this means that they should not be completely neglected.
Bing also has a lot of Keyword tools To help SEO professionals, you’ll find more detail than some of Google’s tools.
In Bing Webmaster Tools, they have an advantage keyword tool That show you relevant/suggested trends and keywords. Bing even shows relevant URLs in order.
Screenshot from: bing.com/webmasters/help, May 2021.The Google: Create comprehensive pages backed by keyword research, but focus on relevance rather than exact match keywords.
Bing: Use direct keywords that exactly match your target terms in Bing search results – just don’t over-optimize. Use their tools to help with other search engines.
2. Backlinks
Google and Bing are very trusted. Both value backlinks, for example, because these are signs that visitors have found your content useful, trust the information you’ve provided, and now want to share it with others.
Google measures trust by measuring the PageRank (the link value that flows through backlinks) of domains linked to your content. High PageRank links are heavily weighted, and some are worth more than hundreds of low PageRank spam links.
Bing also values high-quality links, but they judge quality a little differently. Backlinks are not above all other ranking factors, for Bing. They prefer backlinks from higher quality sites in smaller quantities.
Like Google, Bing also likes internal links with relevant anchor text.
Moreover – Bing removes pages from its index if they do not have enough links, and it is not penalized Buy links:
However, buying a link on a busy website can get you direct traffic, so it remains a valid marketing tactic.
Again, be to caution With this technique, as Bing says:
“Manipulating inbound links to artificially inflate the number of links pointed to in a website can result in your site being removed from the Bing index.”
The Google: Authoritative backlinks and quality content are two of the most important indicators of page authority when it comes to backlinks.
Bing: Fewer and more reliable backlinks are very important, as are internal links with relevant anchor text.
3. Social cues
Google has long denied that social signals play a special role in page ranking, despite much speculation that it plays a small role.
Bing, on the other hand, was historical very open minded On the importance of social cues:
“Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is influence. If you’re a social influencer, that leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn leads to Bing seeing these positive signals.” . These positive signals can have an impact on your organic ranking in the long run.“
If you want to rank well on Bing, you’ll need to keep your ear to the ground in your social media circles.
Using social media in your SEO strategy is time consuming, but worth it if you want to improve for Bing. Consider downloading a comprehensive social media listening tool that will help you find and capitalize on every conversation people have about your business on the web.
Bing also provides an API to check what’s there Trending on social media.
The Google: It handles Facebook and Twitter pages like any other indexed pages.
Bing: Social signals are a major ranking factor. The search results will show you the ratings of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers for different businesses.
4. Multimedia content
Bing has been pushing the envelope when it comes visual searchwhich goes hand in hand with one of its most popular features – “Entity Understanding”.
Basically, Bing has the ability to accurately crawl and understand different types of multimedia content, such as video, audio, and images.
In many ways, Bing leads the pack when it comes to visual search. When Flash was a thing, Bing could crawl and index Flash sites just fine.
Use high quality images and optimize them to help with load time.
Meanwhile, Google still relies heavily on text-based content. High-quality photos and videos are important, but they’re not as heavy as they are on Bing.
The Google: Emphasizes text-based content.
Bing: More emphasis on multimedia content.
5. Other technical differences SEO
While the above four differences are probably the biggest differences that separate Google and Bing, there are still some other small inconsistencies that I have to note.
For example, while you can generally rely on Google to index your website and trust that it will try to crawl and index every page of your site, Bing tends to focus on master pages and crawl your pages infrequently.
Fortunately, you can help this process by increasing your crawl rate with a Bing Webmaster Tools and clicking Crawl control.
You can also submit your sitemap to Bing by clicking Submit a sitemap in webmaster tools or by including a path to it in your robots.txt file – an important step, since this is a ranking signal.
Another benefit of Bing is its API. It allows users to submit URLs to be crawled in bulk, something Google doesn’t have.
Overall, Bing is passionate about helping people rank and has a lot of tools to help you out.
For more examples of technical factors that differ from Google, check out Bing Webmaster Guidelines.
More Bing SEO resources here:
- How to build links for Bing vs. Google
- How Bing Ranks Search Results: The Basic Algorithm and Blue Links
- New Bing Webmaster Tools – Overview and Review
Featured image: Aleh Barysevich / Search Engine Journal
