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Bing is the sleeping giant of the SEO world.
By the end of 2021, Bing had 7.2% of the search engine market share!
And it doesn’t look like it’s stopping any time soon.
The platform has been growing and continues to grow all around the world-
(I call this moment the “Bing Bang”. It never caught on. But I’m still trying!)
This small but significant shift in power has created a new opportunity for SEOs.
So I’m going to show you how to take advantage of that change with my Bing SEO guide.
What Will I Learn?
Many site owners feel mobile and desktop searches on Bing and Yahoo are not as valuable as searches on Google.
I’m not sure why this would be the case. They’re still people, right?
In my experience, they are just as valuable and even surpass Google.
I decided to dig into my own data.
Here’s what I found:
The data tells me everything I need to know.
Incoming traffic has:
Check your own data before passing judgement though!
The best thing about change is – people hate change.
Change pushes people out of their comfort zones and humans are wired to avoid that.
So for those willing to evolve with change there is a great opportunity here.
Since 1998 SEOs have purely focused on ranking sites in Google.
Because Google has the search market share, in turn results are highly competitive.
In that time Bing has been largely ignored.
And SEOs write off trying to improve their rankings by saying…
“If you rank well in Google you’ll also rank well in Bing”.
But is that the case?
Well… not quite:
Their algorithms are remarkably different.
Just compare results for the same term and you will quickly see what I mean.
It’s important to understand those key differences to take advantage of ‘The Big Bing’
(it will catch on).
Unlike Google, Bing are SEO friendly.
They offer a range of free diagnostics and SEO tools to help you understand and use their algorithm and it would be a good idea to take advantage of them.
Reading the Bing Webmaster Guidelines is the quickest way to get yourself up to speed.
You will learn all the dos and don’ts of off-page and on-page SEO for Bing.
It’s not as long/complicated as Google’s guidelines so won’t take you long to read.
The Bing Webmaster Tools are superb!
If you haven’t got your site set up with their Webmaster Tools yet, do it now.
It provides an awesome suite of webmaster tools including a backlink explorer!
You can also see exactly…
As of right now you will also get $100 of free Bing ads credit to play with – sweet!
Pay attention to Bing Webmaster Tools to assist you with your SEO strategy.
The Bing Website SEO Analyzer is also a great tool to discover…
…especially if your pages are following Bing’s SEO best practices.
Just enter your URL into the SEO Analyzer and it will return a list of suggestions to improve your rankings.
More of an unknown tool the free Microsoft SEO Tool Kit
This is a desktop application that spiders your website to find SEO problems.
It is very easy to use and well – it is 100% free so what is not to like!
Just like Google there is also a Bing Webmasters Blog
You should have a read through & subscribe.
Some of the posts are actually quite entertaining and often have some golden nuggets!
Imagine if Matt Cutts and the Google search quality/anti-spam team published a blog
Imagine if on that blog they shared what they’ve been trying & testing.
Well Bing do exactly that!
Their Search Quality Blog offers SEO best practices and some amazing insights into the world of search.
Last but not least.
Perhaps one of the best tools…
Is the ability to contact the Bing webmaster team.
So if your site does have problems or gets hit for any reason.
You can easily get in touch with the team directly to work things out.
Not a bad set of internet marketing tools.
PRO TIPS: Make sure to use the Bingbot to optimize your SEO results.
So what makes Bing tick at its core?
Here’s a list of the most important SEO best practices to optimize your website.
Let’s take a closer look at each of those points-
One of the strongest signals in Bing is user-engagement.
They measure this through a term known as ‘pogo sticking’ which is when someone performs a search, clicks on a result and then clicks back to return to the search results.
So similar to bounce rate but if lots of people visit your site from the search results and click the ‘back’ button –
This is a clear indication of a poor user experience.
However if lots of people visit your site from the search results and do not go back to them to continue searching – This is a very very strong signal.
Bing also measures click-through rates from its search results pages.
They use that data combined with the user experience data above to improve its conversion rate results.
For example: (all things being equal)
If the #1 position gets a 20% click-through rate.
But
The #2 position gets 40% –
This is a clear indication that the #2 result is more relevant.
This means you have to write your titles and descriptions with humans in mind.
But you also need to be specific with your target keywords. Think keyword based click bait.
There is a lot of debate on whether social media signals impact Google’s search rankings.
I can categorically tell you with 100% certainty – that they do.
I’ve been using social media schemes to rank in the search listings consistently for the past 2 years.
I revealed exactly how at a recent conference.
Don’t get caught up in the change debate just make sure social signals are part of your social media SEO strategy now. They affect your rankings in both Bing AND Google.
But this search engine has a much stronger reliance on social signals than Google.
You should use the power of social media to your advantage and you will see benefits in both search engines.
Google famously introduced (and then killed) Authorship allowing people to claim content they have written.
This meant Google Analytics could determine who are the true experts in any given industry. Granted they have killed Authorship for now (but are still tracking who is who via entities & schema data).
Bing also had it’s own version Authorship after they integrated Klout verified snapshots.
But Klout is now dead as well.
So instead you should take advantage of the connected pages feature powered by Bing-
Get started by adding all of your profiles and hit the verify button.
Easy!
Links aren’t held in such high regard as they are by Google.
But, they’re still playing a role in Bing’s SEO strategy.
To quote a recent article from Search Engine Land:
“A Microsoft spokesperson from Bing told us, “There are a variety of factors that come into play with ranking signals, links being one of them.” They also explained that links are still a very important ranking signal, and they don’t see that changing any time soon.”
I’d recommend that you continue to build links to your site but avoiding spammy link schemes, link farms and obvious link manipulation.
It will help you on the majority of search engines including Yahoo and Bing.
But pay close attention to Bing’s movements over the next few years.
Bing places more emphasis on the anchor text usage than Google does.
If you want to rank for ‘Blue Widgets’ you need links that use ‘Blue Widgets’ as the anchor.
They aren’t as good as Google at keyword matching. While Google does well with recognizing synonyms and context around a keyword, Bing needs spoon-feeding.
The risk here is that over optimising your anchor text will trip the Google Penguin filter.
So the trick here is…
Make sure that the link count coming from high authority sites focus on exact match anchor text!
While the others use a mix of anchor terms.
That will allow you to rank in Bing while dodging Google Penguin.
Having your target keyword in your domain name will help you to rank easier.
It isn’t critical but target keywords do help.
However Google does have a filter for exact match domain names.
So it is best to use a domain that includes your keyword but isn’t exact match keywords.
The only problem with that is…
The other thing that you will notice when comparing Google and Bing results – Bing doesn’t place as much weight on backlinks!
BUT: It does place weight on site authority.
It is much harder to rank a new domain in Bing than it is in Google. Domain age matters!
Having an aged domain will give you an extra leg up across Bing’s results.
So if you have an older domain that includes your keyword – you are golden!
If you just have an older domain your still in a strong position.
Where you don’t want to be is with a brand new domain.
PageRank is a measurement of authority created in the early days of Google. It is not as relevant as it once was and hasn’t been updated for a long time now.
However it is important to note:
Google PageRank does not seem to have any correlation with Bing rankings.
Bing prefers sites that have lots of unique content which is also of good content quality.
They place a much higher value on longer more engaging content than shorter content and their image search beats other search engines.
You need to use Bing with specific search terms you want your page to rank for.
It is much better to focus on 1 page per keyword.
But again be careful you don’t trip Google Panda by offering duplicate content and keyword stuffing.
They also tries to eliminate duplicate content at the point of indexing. Redundant content is recognized and eliminated from search market result pages.
But may still be available in the index.
Bing offer a few interesting pieces of advice around your site structure and coding.
First of all, they advise that quality content should be organized close to the surface. In other words, no content Bing views, should be more than 3 clicks away from the home page.
You should also use a broad to specific structure flow. So you might go with:
Onsite optimization is similar for Bing’s search algorithm as it is to Google.
You want to ensure you use:
They place a lot of emphasis on title tags but keeps the user-engagement signals in mind. You should only have one H1 tag per page to establish the main topic.
Then use the H2 and H3 tags to talk about subtopics.
It is also worth noting that sometimes Bing will swap out your meta description with your H1 tag in the search results so be creative with your headings.
Don’t just rely on exact headings.
Google recently announced that HTTPS is now used as a ranking signal.
Although a very minor one.
Bing Lead Program Manager Vincent Wehren said that HTTPs is not a ranking factor. They don’t want to mess around with rankings based on a factor that has no real relevance.
(Check out my complete SEO checklist for 2024).
Recently they announced that instead of sitting and waiting for your page to get crawled…
You can actually submit your URL’s to its search engine for crawl control and then indexing.
In the announcement they stated:
We believe that enabling this change will trigger a fundamental shift in the way that search engines, such as Bing, retrieve and are notified of new and updated content across the web.
BingSo instead of 10 URL’s a day which was the previous crawl rate…
You can now submit up to 10000!
Let’s take a quick look at how you submit your URL’s.
This is a very easy process – get started by using the ‘Submit URL’s’ feature that can be found within ‘Configure My Site’ section in the Webmaster Tools.
Or alternatively, you can use the ‘Submit URL API’ method.
Either way, using the new submission tools means getting your sites indexed FAST.
We don’t know a whole lot about Bing’s penalties.
What we do know for sure is they are a much friendlier beast than Google.
There are certainly no crazy black and white animal updates to deal with here!
The Bing Index Quality team have published a few articles on the Bing Webmaster blog that are worth reading-
They show you actual case study examples with a lot of details about each update.
It is very important that you stay on top of your outbound link profile. Make sure that you are only linking to clean and related sites as Bing will punish you for this seriously.
Reciprocal linking will also get you in trouble.
If you have experience with ranking sites in Google you will know to avoid those SEO practices.
Spam detection methods are much further behind the times than Google’s.
Bing makes it easy to see if your site has a penalty. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools.
Click on the ‘Summary Tool’ then look at the ‘Site Status’ section – if it shows Blocked:
Yes – your site has been penalised.
If this is the case then take a look at this post from Bing Webmaster to get out of the penalty box.
Now you can take Bing seriously and check if it should be part of your marketing strategy!
Check your own data, review your traffic source and decide whether the search engine is worth it – It was for me!
(If you’re looking for SEO tools to check/monitor your Bing rankings, take a look at my list of the best Bing rank tracker tools).
You can use this part of the guide to optimize your site for Bing traffic if a chunk of your target market use Bing.
We covered:
Now it’s over to you!
Do you get any traffic from Bing’s search engine and the Yahoo search engine at the moment? If you do – how does it perform compared to Google traffic?
Let me know in the comments below along with your name and email address.
216 Responses
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Thanks for the sharing this blog with us
No problem 🙂
Check your data and if it’s worth it then definitely include it in your SEO strategy.
Happy to see this amazing features of Bing. Now onwards i also work for bing.
You should include Bing SEO in your SEO strategy for sure!
happy I checked my inbox.your post came at the right time.I will try this out and see how it goes. keep sharingkeep inspiring
Let me know the results!
This is superb! Haven’t v really paid attention to Hing. But something worth a try
Thanks, once again Matthew for a very valuable article giving us so much useful information. Factors for ranking in Bing have always been a mystery to me. I will now be able to implement SEO for traffic from this source.
No problem Chris, you should definitely include these factors in your SEO strategy!
This list is great! Just a heads up that the link to the Microsoft SEO Tool Kit doesn’t seem to work.
Updated thanks 🙂
Great resources as usual.Pls check, the Microsoft SEO Tool Kit returned error message
Thanks just fixed it up!
Thank you for all the information about Bing! I had forgotten about Bing and this is a wonderful wake-up call back to Bing! Love it! Thank you!
I’m not saying focus on them, but they should be included 🙂
Thank you for your quality information. I have bookmarked this page.
No problem
WOW, Bing seems to be a lot cooler than Google. I never used Bing as a traffic source in my life before. But this post is compelling me to do so otherwise. Bookmarked this post and will now implement each and every step to start my Bing SEO journey. Wish me luck for a smooth sail. Thanks for sharing this useful info.
No problem, just make sure there part of your processes is all 🙂
Hey Matt,Thank you for writing this article. It came at the right time because just two days ago, I added my new site: https://groupleads.net to bing webmasters and since then I have not taken the time to complete the verification and other things.This article is quite enlightening and i’m encouraged to finish everything this morning. Oh before I forgot, I active saw your post on facebook and I follow it back here.
Yeah go through and do that, add your social profiles and see what happens 🙂
Great piece.I recently submitted my site to Bing and it felt good. The focus is on Google. Watch any youtube video on SEO, it’s all about how to rank on Google. This post gave me some insight into the big Bing.
Thanks Kaycee, I’m still hoping ‘The Big Bing’ will catch on.
Haha, anythings possible!
Awesome article Matt, I really enjoy reading this and it so useful content that every blogger should know for traffic generating.
Thanks very much. Massive opportunity a lot of people are missing.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH ADMIN!!! YOUR INFORMATION IS SO HELPFUL FOR ME… AS IM WORKING ON BING TRAFFIC.
Hey 🙂 no problem, glad you found my post
Your style is so unique compared to other folks I have read stuff from. Many thanks for posting when you have the opportunity, Guess I’ll just bookmark this page.
Yes I am one of a kind haha. Thanks for the bookmark, come back soon 🙂
Aw, this was a really nice post. Taking the time and actual effort to produce a top notch article… but what can I say… I hesitate a whole lot and never seem to get nearly anything done.
Thanks for the feedback, work hard and you will move forward 🙂
Interesting information. Thank you.
Thanks Denae
Great article
Thanks Mark
Thanks for the valuable insight! This is an informative, good quality article which is refreshing in the age of click-bait 🙂
Cheers Jamila
So, in your opinion is it still easier to rank on big than google?
Yes for sure
Really informative article. I have seen that ranking in Bing is pretty easier. Just number of backlinks matters.
Yes it’s generally easier
I see this blog good quality and excellent. I earn good knowledge and skill.
I try to do that with every post 🙂
I have been strugling with bing tools long time for my sites, even i didn’t got what is gooing on in bing tools rather than understanding bing factors. Google web master tools are way easier than bing and shows more clear effects of your recent work on website seo
Yeah I agree the interface on Bing Webmaster Tools is hard work
Bing is underrated in the seo world, i used to have an emd which was making $100 every month without any work. and yeah it got ranked after 3 days of registration.
Yeah its a great opportunity
Hi…..Matthew I want to remove my spam score,my spam score is 8/17. I have submitted spam link file to google webmaster tool (Disavow) since 20 days ago but still the spam score is same. So plz do help me to reduce the spam score.
Where are you getting the spam score from?
I see this blog good quality and excellent. I earn good knowledge and skill.
Thanks 🙂
I love Duckduckgo
Quack whack!
Your article is very relevant and important. initially we are aiming seriously at Google but when I realised that 20M+ people visit bing.com daily for search opportunities then I knew I need to target Bing and be a dominant in my niche on Tue search. thanks for your tips. Really great.
No problem Lawrence, I think Bing offers a great opportunity!
Such a help full article.
Thanks Matt!
great post
Thanks Komal!
very nice
No problem 🙂
We all know that search engine is the best source to drive targeted traffic and customers. Right?Search engines like Google plays a major role in delivering potential customers and readers.To become a succeessful business man, We have must high traffic from Google but nowadays I have noticed that It is being harder and harder to get ranked in Google.Due to the rise of spammers, Google is improving their algorithms and removing spammers from their SERPs.The ranking factors which you have mentioned above are very much important and It can help us to get ranked better in SERPs.I only believe that We should must have indepth and detailed content which can help readers. If We have such types of content then We can easily drive huge organic traffic without making more efforts.I am glad that you have shared such a wonderful article with us. 😀
Does Domain Age matters for Bing??
Yes it does help
Does domain age influences on bing more or less than it does on google?
I don’t think there is much in it to be honest
I have an old domain that I finally turned into a site and it’s already on page 1 in Bing results. It hasn’t even been 2 weeks, is this a beginner’s luck thing or because it’s an exact match domain that has been sitting there for a few years?Great article btw. I would think it makes sense that Bing is easier to rank than Google.
Bing likes EMD’s a little more than Google, but to put thing sin perspective for you – this blog ranks terribly in Bing 🙂
Trust me ranking on bing is harder some time cause there are only some working methods.
I think it’s much easier than Google!
I am very shocked that HTTPS is not a ranking factor for Bing, while Google is working. Thanks for sharing this point.
Well there are a bunch of differences 🙂
thanks for sharing amazing article Mathew, it will help the beginners like me. Thank You. 🙂
No problem Robert 🙂
Thanks a lot for this very informative article however could you tell us why bing shows lessor pages in bing search than google even after submitting them the sitemap
How much time has passed?
Wow I didn’t know all that about Bing, but to be honest, most the time when we optimize a web page for any given keyword, we normally start ranking faster and better in Bing than we do in Google. It’s almost as if Bing ranks you without doing any SEO.Rankings in Google take forever and its 10X harder.
Perhaps you should offer bing seo as a service then 🙂
that greats news, at least it will finish the monopoly situation, when healthy competition comes in the market it will definitely help the users. however Bing needs to upgrade web master tools, especially the analytics area.
I hope so!
Thanks for your amazing, informative article!Even though you lightly touched on Bing Webmaster Tool’s connected pages I find it a fantastic opportunity to insert all the social media pages associated with your website, thus drawing in additional attention to your website in search results.I never knew that Bing offers a Bing Authorship, I’m going to have to start implementing that!It is so ironic, I was actually thinking about Bing and their consideration of backlinks this morning and how much they actually weigh in on quantity and quality of backlinks.I will have to start looking for Bing Penalties, I assumed they didn’t penalize (at least at this stage of their growth as a search engine).
I love the image search on bing. Have you compared the image search on bing to google? 🙂
I haven’t actually
I have an estimatet 300 pages online – testing different SEO approaches. One thing all my black sites boostet with PBN’s has in common – are – They are top 3 in BING. BH definetly has a great impact on BING ratings. I track with authoritylabs – and same sites has rankings off 50+ in google. So for now I would say – “HIT” the spam buttom – if you just have smaller niche sites – which you will target BING users only.
Good information 🙂
Matthew:I have a couple of bing sites I want to rank. Are you currently taking on clients for this? It is something I want to do but just have not had time to get to. I would like to outsource if possible.
Yes please see https://www.searchlogistics.com/
Hi there, was just wondering for those who have commented on the increase of reach/clicks in Bing as compared to Google, since the default pages are only for North America, Belarussians, Kazakhstans, and Russians, is your target market these countries then? Does that explain the increase?Wan
Really intersting point. Bing traffic does convert and does make money but it is just a much smaller amount than Google brings. I think the new marketshare gained by the other SE is really significant.But I also know that I changed the default SE the moment I realized this had been changed. Most people don’t like when things like this are forced to them so I know many people will switch back immediately.I’m more concerned with all the new people switching to Firefox and not realizing it. This also makes me wonder… Didn’t Firefox make lots of money via Google partnerships etc? What is happening to that with these changes.
It’s not the size that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts.
Hope this doesn’t get posted twice; I had an issue with the first try.Anyways…. I have a few EMD sites that died on google about 3 years ago, but have consistently ranked on yahoo/bing for a very long time (and they still do.)They are decent volume keywords that I am ranking for, and they do generate consistent money (about 1/4 as much money as they generated when they ranked on page 1 of google, but its still decent.)Anyways, I noticed that EMD’s seem to get a really big advantage on Bing (not sure if this is the case with really high volume kewords though.)However, according to this post, you are at a serious disadvantage when using a new domain (even if EMD I’m guessing?)Heres the question: Do you think I would be better off buying an aged domain that didn’t have any of the keywords in the domain name? OR just buying a brand new EMD domain?I use spam tools like GSA Search Engine ranker etc… (which is how my existing older EMD sites rank… all of their keywords were just built with spammy SEO tools.)I’m leaning more towards just buying brand new EMD domains… cheaper too.After 2 or 3 months of spamming, the EMD domains that I bouth 2 or 3 months ago aren’t ranking very consistently. Sometimes the lower volume ones rank on page 1, but then they bounce to like page 5, or they dispensary completely for awhile.What is even more strange, is that sometimes my crappy auto generated subpages rank on page 1, even though the homepage is no where to be found (these rankings don’t last though.)If bing/yahoo hates autogenerated “dupe” content so much, then why do they cache all of my auto generated content pages so easily? Hell, I don’t even spin the content on my subpages; I just use WP Robot to generate it.My homepage IS quality content and is all hand written, unique content, and the onpage SEO is spot on.Also, my existing older sites that rank VERY well indeed have auto generated content for most of their subpages, so I’m pretty sure that the auto content subpages isn’t hurting anything :)The way my newer EMD’s are bouncing around reminds me a lot of the google dance bs. Tell me it isn’t so :)I think I spammed way too many exact achor links to them. I am now in the process of spreading out my anchor text more though. Hope that helps.I’m probably just over-paranoid; it is probably just a matter of time before the new sites rank well (well, at least the lower volume ones… not sure about the higher volume/competition ones.)Wow, that turned into a really long comment :)Again, what do you think? Am I wasting my time getting brand new EMD domains? Will it take a year+ to rank those, VS aged domains?
Great feedback =DTo be honest I haven’t bothered with EMD domains for a long time now
Haha don’t worry your weren’t the only one 😛