If Bing is treated as a punchline in digital marketing circles, you may be missing out on the biggest untapped opportunity for your business.
Some people forget that search engines other than Google exist, but Bing is a great place to build your online presence.
Bing and Yahoo (using Bing since 2010) together dominate the US desktop search engine market share of 9.97%.
More importantly, many marketers note that Bing traffic has higher conversion rates than Google traffic.
This may have something to do with Bing’s average demographic being more mature and arguably spending more money.
Screenshot: analytics.google.com, November 2017.Bing also partners with dozens of other search engines, including Yahoo!, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, MSN and Lycos.
So if you’re not searching on Google, you’re likely using a search experience that’s partially powered by Bing.
That doesn’t even include voice search (both Alexa and Cortana use Bing) and the fact that Bing is built into most Microsoft products, including Microsoft Office and Xbox.
Fortunately, if you’ve already invested in Google SEO, you’re just one step away from getting tangible results on other search engines. This is because Bing and Google share many of the same ranking signals.
Still, there are important differences between Google and Bing SEO. Here you will learn about them.
1. Keywords
Bing announced in 2014 that it would no longer consider meta keywords for ranking purposes, but search engines like Yandex and Baidu still do.
Google has worked to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and interpreting contextual cues from various websites.
We call this semantic search. It relies in part on machine learning and artificial intelligence (such as RankBrain) to help it understand the content of the page.
Google says RankBrain is the third most important factor in their ranking algorithm. In other words, exact match keywords are less important than creating comprehensive topic pages and articles for your visitors.
Bing is catching up when it comes to broad match keywords.
Their Webmaster Guidelines advise to “develop rich content based on keyword research that shows the information searchers are looking for.”
Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines are explicit about how keywords can help you rank. Bing doesn’t rule it out Using meta keyword tags (Google ignores this).
This is no excuse to abuse them or stuff meta tags with irrelevant keywords. But that means you shouldn’t ignore them completely.
Bing also has a number of keyword tools to help SEO professionals find more detailed information than some Google tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools has a powerful keyword tool that shows trends and related/suggested keywords. Bing also displays relevant ranking URLs.
Screenshot: bing.com/webmasters/help, May 2021.Google: Create comprehensive pages backed by keyword research, but focus on topic relevance rather than exact match keywords.
Bing: Use simple keywords that match exactly the terms you’re targeting in Bing search results. But don’t over-optimize. Use tools to help other search engines.
2. Backlink
Both Google and Bing value trust. For example, backlinks indicate that visitors find your content useful, trust the information you provide, and want to share it with others.
Google measures trust by measuring the PageRank (the link equity that flows through your backlinks) of the domains that link to your content. High PageRank links are weighted, and some of them are much more valuable than hundreds of low PageRank spam links.
Bing also rates high-quality links, but judges quality a little differently. For Bing, backlinks do not rank above all other ranking factors. They like a small amount of backlinks from quality sites.
Like Google, Bing likes internal links with relevant anchor text.
In addition to this, Bing removes pages from its index when there are not enough links and does not penalize buying links.
“However, buying links on a busy website can generate direct traffic and is a valid marketing strategy.”
Again, as Bing says, be careful with this technique.
“Manipulating incoming links to artificially inflate the number of links pointing to your website may result in your site being excluded from the Bing index.”
Google: Reliable backlinks and quality content are the most important indicators of a page’s authority when it comes to backlinks.
Bing: Fewer, more authoritative backlinks are very important, as are internal links with relevant anchor text.
3. Social signals
Google has long denied that social signals play any special role in page ranking.
Bing, on the other hand, has historically been very open about the importance of social signals.
“Social media plays a key role in our current efforts to rank higher in search results. The most obvious role it plays is through influence. If so, this will lead your followers to share your information widely so that Bing will recognize these positive signals. These positive signals can affect how you rank organically in the long run.“
If you want to rank high on Bing, you have to listen to your social media circles.
Incorporating social media into your SEO strategy takes time, but it’s worth it when optimizing for Bing. Consider downloading a comprehensive social media listening tool. It helps you find and leverage all the conversations people are having about your business on the web.
Bing also provides an API for checking social media trends.
Google: Treat Facebook and Twitter pages like any other indexed page.
Bing: Social signals are an important ranking factor. The search results show various business ratings by his Facebook friends and his Twitter followers.
4. Multimedia content
Bing has pushed the boundaries when it comes to visual search. This goes hand-in-hand with one of the most touted features: Entity Understanding.
Fundamentally, Bing has the ability to accurately crawl and understand different types of multimedia content such as video, audio, and images.
In many ways, Bing is ahead of the pack when it comes to visual search. Back when Flash was all the rage, Bing had no problem crawling and indexing Flash sites.
Use high quality images and optimize them for faster loading times.
Google, on the other hand, still relies most heavily on text-based content. High quality images and videos are important, but not as important as Bing.
Google: Emphasize text-based content.
Bing: Focus on multimedia content.
5. Other Technical SEO Differences
The four differences above are probably the biggest differences between Google and Bing, but there are some other minor differences that you should be aware of.
For example, you can usually have Google index your website and trust that Google will try to crawl and index every page on your site, but Bing focuses on the main pages and tends to be crawled less frequently.
Luckily, I used Bing Webmaster Tools to increase my crawl rate and crawl control.
You can also click to submit your sitemap to Bing. Submit sitemap This is an important step as it is a ranking signal.
Another advantage of Bing is its API. This allows users to submit URLs to be crawled in bulk, a feature Google does not have.
In general, Bing is excited to help people rank, and there are plenty of tools to help.
See Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines for examples of technical factors that differ from Google’s.
Find more Bing SEO resources here:
Featured Image: Aleh Barysevich/Search Engine Journal
