Bing is a search engine from Microsoft. It is the default search engine in the Edge browser. It is not so popular in Ukraine, but it is used much more actively in America. The IDEA Digital Agency team is engaged in promotion in the West, so we conducted our research and found out if it is worth it.
Today we are talking about SEO promotion in Bing, its features, and key differences from website optimization in Google.
Features of the Bing search engine
- In addition to the Bing.com search engine itself, it also includes the Yahoo information portal and the anonymous DuckDuckGo search engine, which provide additional traffic (about 30-40%) and work according to the same algorithms;
- In more than 80% of cases, users use it using the Microsoft Edge browser, the remaining 20% are divided among other browsers, including 10% - Google Chrome;
- If you look globally, then worldwide the Bing search engine is used by thirty times fewer people than Google. But if you limit the geography to the United States of America, you can suddenly discover interesting statistics. So, according to the Comscore platform as of April 2021, 26.5% of all search queries in the United States were made through the Microsoft search engine. And this is a fairly solid "piece" of traffic.
As you can see, promotion of an English-language website should include at least a study of the potential capabilities of this search engine in each specific case. In other words, if you want to promote to the American audience, you definitely need to learn more about SEO under Bing.
Audience in Bing
Who uses Bing? Basically, people who either don't want to use Chrome or are "you" with a computer. Among the users, the following prevail:
- children who use their parents' computer;
- elderly people who do not understand all the nuances of the settings and use the search engine that is installed "by default";
- people who rarely use the computer for minor purposes, such as printing documents.
Users with experience in surfing the Internet are relatively few. It is worth considering this fact if you decide to perform search engine promotion in Bing - always remember the interests of the specific audience of this search engine.
Features of On-page promotion
Internal optimization of a site for Bing consists of the same stages as Google promotion but has its own distinctive features. If you do not understand what is involved, perhaps you should order SEO site promotion from professionals.
Bing Webmaster Panel
This is an analog of Google's Search Console. It has many similar functions:
- viewing the number of clicks, impressions, and CTR;
- monitoring the site for crawl errors, etc.
Also, you can not only regularly review how well the site was indexed in Bing, but also use the Webmaster Tool for keyword search and SEO analysis.
Having collected semantics, you should properly manage it. Let's look at the features of optimizing pages for Bing.
Headings
Only the H1 and H2 level headings are of great importance. Insert the desired key into them, and this will greatly affect your position in the search results. Keywords in lower-level headings work in the same way as keywords in the text - they do not affect your positions in any special way.
Quality and size of content
Interesting features of Bing: the size and quality of the text you are going to use for promotion do not matter. Unlike Google, where it is important to focus on the number of words of competitors and pay sufficient attention to the quality of the content, to promote in Bing it is enough to simply optimize the text well. The algorithms of this search engine are not so developed that they can analyze content at the level of Google.
Structure
A positive signal for the Bing search engine is a diverse page structure. This refers to the HTML structure - the presence of various blocks in the layout. It is important to adapt the site to Bing: this not only allows it to rank better but can also affect the snippet of pages.
Micromarkup
Our Bing study showed a huge impact of micro markup on the snippet. The more attractive it is, the higher the click-through rate will be. For example, emojis significantly increase this indicator. But don't overdo it: use micro markup wisely and only where appropriate.
As for formats, Bing supports HTML and JSON micromarkup formats.
Canonical
When it comes to canonicals, Bing is extremely strict: it will follow exactly the rules you specify. For Google, for example, canonical is more of a recommendation. Therefore, when promoting Bing, be careful and immediately correct any inaccuracies in the canonical.
Features of link building under Bing
Just like in Google, promoting a site in Bing includes working with links.
Let's take a closer look at this process. Remember that building a mass of links for an English-language site is fundamentally different from the same process for sites in Ukraine. Read more about linkbuilding for the USA in our previous article.
How to choose donors
The most important factor in choosing a donor site for link building in Bing is its indexing. Unfortunately, even a well-developed site may simply not be indexed, which is why all its advantages cease to be advantages.
When choosing a site, look at:
- is it in the results;
- how long has it been indexed;
- How often is it indexed in principle?
Where to place links
Links from the main pages work best. Even if the site is super trustworthy and you found or wrote the perfect thematic article for a separate page, a link on the main page will work many times better.
By the way, when promoting in Bing, less attention is paid to the question of which links to place - anchor or anchorless, so the choice is yours.
Doorway crawlers
Another feature of Bing. Local doorway crawlers specifically parse the TOP results in order to obtain unique content and snippets and generate new dories similar to search engines that link to your resource. Therefore, we recommend regularly monitoring the link profile of the site in order to catch such sites in a timely manner and keep your profile clean.
Social networks
As the creators of the search engine themselves say, Bing views the site's accounts on social networks (in particular, on Twitter) and records how many times a particular link was placed there. Social signals can work in different ways: they can help index pages, or they can immediately affect their positions in the search results.
Tools and services for work
To make site promotion under Bing as productive as possible, use the following tools:
- Webmaster Tool from Bing — we have already talked about it before, it is one of the key services that will help you in promotion;
- SE Ranking — this tool is suitable for removing positions by keywords in Bing;
- Ahrefs — use it to work with links, you can also collect semantics with it (but the internal Keyword Research tool in the Webmaster Panel is more informative).
Differences between promotion in Google and Bing
- It is easier to get free traffic from Bing than from Google, but the audience of these search engines is radically different, which should be taken into account when promoting;
- The Bing crawler works about six times slower than the Google crawler, which means that a hundred new pages on your site will be scanned by the Bing bot six times slower than the Google bot;
- If Google uses machine learning algorithms to form search results, then in Bing the top results are manually adjusted - so your optimized site, which should be in the TOP 3, may not even appear in the top ten;
- If you get a ban from Bing - you will most likely not be able to get out of it: despite the fact that technical support responds very quickly (within 24 hours), resolving the issue in your favor will not succeed. For this reason, there are a lot of young sites in Bing's results, because old domains were banned for one reason or another and never ranked again.
Conclusion
Bing is still quite popular in the USA, so it can be a good assistant in promoting in the West. To promote it or not is up to you. We have indicated the basic information that you can use when making a decision
