By entrepreneur and writer Amin Lahore.Amin is the CEO of iron monkCMO of Regal Assets, a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, and an IRA firm.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a one-on-one battle. As many CEOs and business owners know well, it is possible to rank on Google, but not on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. And as an entrepreneur, you should care about both rankings.
In March 2019, Bing served over 126 million unique users in the US with a staggering 6 billion searches. This makes up more than a third of his total US search market for desktop devices. Why haven’t I heard of this before? Bing’s quiet growth has been fueled by 1.5 billion Windows devices that search Bing by default.
As the founder of two full-service digital marketing agencies, we know what it takes to rank your website, not just Google. For nearly a decade, we have helped countless clients achieve first positions on both Google and Bing Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a large number of competitive keywords. This article will show you how.
Differences between Bing and Google Search
Before diving into the Bing ranking strategy, let’s first parse out the relevant details between the two platforms.
Many CEOs refer to Bing as Google’s staunch brother who hasn’t evolved enough since the 2000s. In a way it is true. In my experience, Bing is more likely to favor content that incorporates his outdated SEO tactics like stuffing keywords into page metadata. However, this is something Bing denies.
This logic leads Bing to focus less on backlinks (off-page SEO) and more on keyword usage (on-page SEO) than Google Search.
However, there is an important point to keep in mind. Bing will not index webpages that are not your home page unless they are linked to at least one external domain. While Google strives to index every property on his web, Bing requires that secondary web pages have at least one do-follow backlink from an authoritative site. Ideally, the authority site’s anchor text is a direct match.
There is some evidence to suggest that Bing is prioritizing small local businesses in its search results. Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines also indicate that social signals (i.e. shares from social media profiles) are given more weight in their ranking algorithms.
How to optimize Bing’s SEO strategy
Below, we’ve covered the basic ground rules for optimizing your on-page and off-page SEO to positively impact your Bing rankings without losing your position on Google.
first step
If you’ve optimized your business’s web presence for Bing, claim your business on the Bing platform, just like Google My Business. To do this, go to Bing Places for Business and create a listing for your company. This step will greatly improve your local SEO ranking performance.
Then, after signing in to your business account, use your search engine’s Webmaster Tools feature to index your site on Bing. This requires verifying website ownership using a backend XML sitemap. Microsoft has a helpful guide that walks you through this process.
Finally, classify your website with tags. This way, Bing can better understand the right audience for your content. All pages of your website should have relevant tags. Check out this helpful guide on how to add tags to WordPress.
Bing On-Page SEO
When it comes to website text elements, there are some ranking factors to keep in mind. Below we have listed the most important factors, ranked in order of priority.
• Exact keyword matching: Bing prioritizes content with verbatim keyword matches in the content and web page title (for example, “Where can I buy lumber in Denver, Colorado” for the long-tail keyword “Where can I buy lumber in Denver?”). (match where you can buy ).
• Quality and presentation: All content must be authoritative, socially recognizable, value added, readable and scannable.
• Optimized Meta Description: Include keywords that exactly match your meta description of 160 characters or less.
• Keywords in URLs: URL slugs should not be a collection of random characters. Instead, make sure that you also include keyword matches.
Bing off-page SEO
There is little research on the importance of backlinks in Bing’s search algorithm.
However, a 2013 study by Search Metrics found that 53% of the backlinks in the top 30 search results on Bing contained a direct keyword match in the anchor text. On the other hand, Google’s search results yielded only about 43% direct matches. So a good place to start off-page SEO for Bing is to contact the webmaster behind the backlink and politely ask them to change the anchor text to the direct keyword you’re trying to rank for. .
In addition, Bing maintains a backlink network that includes older domains (website age is Bing’s domain authority factor), including links from .gov, .edu, and .org domains and links from social media websites. Prioritize what you have. Social platforms and educational domains are among the top two off-page ranking factors that separate Bing and Google.
put it all together
Ultimately, Bing’s ranking algorithm is the same as Google’s. However, the main differences include backlink prioritization for social signals, full keyword matching, and URL and title keyword matching. If you can optimize your website for these factors, you have a much better chance of getting his coveted first SERP position on Microsoft’s rapidly growing Bing platform.
