Bing – The forgotten Search Engine

Bing – The Forgotten Search Engine

Think online search, and the first thing that comes to mind is Google. But there is another star in town: Bing – the search engine from Microsoft. Though not as popular as Google yet, Bing is steadily growing its search engine market share. So let’s see what the benefits of Bing search engine for your business are and how to make your website Bing-friendly.

Bing is often installed on new computers and many people may not even realise they are using Bing and not Google. So, it is worth remembering that Bing has up to 30% of the market share (depending on who you ask!)

Your target customer may not always be on Google. With most marketing strategies planned around Google, Bing offers less competition. So, it is important to optimize your site for other search engines, including the fast-growing Bing.

What are the benefits of Bing for business?

Bing Search Advertising

This is a PPC platform especially beneficial for small businesses. It is very cost-effective and allows you to import your ads from other platforms. Bing Search Advertising has excellent audience targeting and allows you to target potential audiences by time or device. You can also target customers based on their LinkedIn profile data.

Bing Places for Business

Most users searching for a local business or store are looking to visit the business. Local visibility is, therefore, vital for businesses. Just like Google my Business, Bing Places is very relevant for local SEO.

Excellent Image Search

Bing has excellent image search options and offers high-quality image results. It allows you to search with filters.

Video Search

Bing presents its video search results as thumbnails, so users can watch them without leaving the results page. You just need to hover the mouse over the thumbnail without the need for scrolling.

Easily available optimization resources

Bing is more open about its ranking signals, unlike Google. It provides various tools and resources to understand their algorithm. Bing Webmaster Guidelines and Bing Webmaster Tools are two excellent resources to understand their SEO guidelines.

How can you make your site Bing-friendly?

Though the algorithms are different for Google and Bing, the SEO techniques are very similar. You may want to pay attention to the following points.

Backlinks

Organic links from trusted sites, specially .org, .edu have a strong impact on your ranking. Links from older domains, send a strong signal to Bing that your content is authentic and trustworthy. Stay away from shady linking practices like linking to and from hacked sites, reciprocal links, paid links etc.

Quality content

Bing favours longer content that addresses user queries. It also gives importance to content presentation. So, using image and videos in your content can be very effective. With constantly evolving algorithms, relevance and keyword intent are now considered an essential factor along with content quality.

Keywords

Bing is all about keyword matching. But going for exact keyword match domain can hurt your Google rankings. The best way is to include your keyword in title and meta tags, and alt text in an as natural way as possible. This helps you to avoid keyword stuffing.

Social Media

Social shares are a vital signal for rankings. Bing considers social shares as a measure of page popularity. The more your content is shared on social media, the higher your chances of a good ranking.

Now that you know what the benefits of Bing for business are, you can make use of it for your business growth. The trick is to work a solution around conflicting metrics and optimize your site for both Bing and Google. We can help you do that. Talk to our SEO experts to get a strategy tailor-made for your business.

Jargon Buster

Algorithm – Here, the complete set of ranking signals for search engine.
Social shares – The number of times your content or post is shared on social media.
Reciprocal links – An agreement by two sites to link to each other.