Whenever we talk about search engines, we often refer to Google. In fact, Google became a synonym for the word “search”.
Although Google has a lion’s share (over 88%) when it comes to the market share of search engines worldwide.
Guess what? Google is NOT the only search engine as there are other search engines as well such as Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and more.
If you think Google is often filled with millions of search results in almost every industry and looking for an alternative search engine to improve your site’s traffic and sales, Bing is for you.
Bing (also referred to as “Microsoft Bing”) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. Similar to Google, Bing also offers a wide range of search services including web, video, image, and map search products.
Here’s how the interface of Bing looks like;
As you can see above, Microsoft Bing’s interface is pretty straightforward and simple where you can search for anything in several languages or you can also perform specific image or video searches.
According to Statista, Bing accounted for 6.18% of the global search market. In 2009, Yahoo! made a deal with Microsoft and has been fully powered by Bing ever since.
So if you’re looking for a beginner’s guide to Bing SEO in 2021 to rank your website in Bing search results, you’re in the right place. Let’s get started without much ado.
Bing SEO Optimization: An Easy Guide for Total Beginners
What is Bing SEO?
Bing SEO is the process of optimizing your website to improve its organic rankings in Bing search results.
Whether you know it or not, Bing is the world’s second-largest search engine with over 6% search market share.
Bing is small in comparison to a search engine giant like Google but it holds a great market share in many countries particularly in the US.
So if you’re someone who’s targeting countries like the US to get better organic visibility for your website, you should NOT ignore Microsoft Bing.
What Are the Benefits of Using Bing for Bloggers?
As a blogger, what are the benefits of Bing? Why should you even care about Bing in 2021? Here are some of the benefits of Bing.
- Bing also powers Yahoo!’s search engine which is currently the fourth largest search engine in the world. That means, if you optimize your website for Bing, you’re also optimizing for Yahoo!
- Bing has a better image search functionality so users can see high-quality images on the Bing image results page (as a blogger, by doing proper image SEO, you’ll also get more traffic from Bing image search)
- There’s less competition. Google is a HUGE search engine and there’s a lot of competition in almost every industry. If you want less competition and looking for better search rankings, try Bing.
- Bing is not as harsh as Google when it comes to penalizing over-optimized sites. You can get better rankings on Bing by using your target keywords multiple times on your page. Just make sure your content is great.
- Yahoo and Bing own one third of the U.S. Search Market. So if you’re targeting the US audience, Bing is a great search engine to optimize for.
- With Bing, you can afford both to advertise on and optimize for it. Thanks to a low competition on Bing. Yes, Bing ads are much cheaper than Google ads.
Getting Started With Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free tool that includes a ton of useful tools including a keyword research tool, outbound links controller with the disavow option, a reporting tool, and more.
If you’re new to Bing, just follow the below instructions to get started with Bing Webmaster tools.
Create an account with Bing Webmaster Tools
The first step to getting started with Bing SEO is that you need to create an account with Bing Webmaster Tools.
Similar to Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service that allows website owners to add their websites to the Bing index crawler, analyze backlinks, manage keywords, and more in Bing.
You can visit this link to sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools for FREE.
You can either choose your Microsoft account or Facebook account to sign up with Bing webmaster tools.
Once you’ve created an account logged into Bing Webmaster Tools, you can add your site easily by click on the “Add a Site” option which looks like this;
As you can see above, we’ve already added our site. You can also add multiple sites that you own to see all your website’s performance.
Once you’ve added your website, you need to verify it.
There are 2 easy ways of verifying your website to Bing:
- Place a BingSiteAuth.xml file in the root directory of your website
- Embed HTML code with meta tags to your homepage
Once the verification is done, you can see your site’s search performance, add new URLs, submit your website’s sitemap, and access everything from Bing Webmaster Tools.
Make sure your pages are indexed
You’ll start getting search traffic only if your website pages are getting indexed on Bing, right? So the first step is to check whether your pages are indexed or not.
You can do that by entering site:yoursitename.com in Bing.com
Have a look at our blog’s example
As you can see above, our site’s pages are getting indexed on Bing search results.
If your website pages are already getting indexed on Google without any issues, you’ll NOT face issues with Bing indexing as well.
But… if you’re running a brand new website, it might take some time for Bing to start indexing your pages. You can also submit your URLs using your Bing Webmasters Tool account.
Just go to the “URL Submission” tab to submit your URLs for indexing.
Here’s how it looks like;
Also, make sure to submit a sitemap, so Bing search crawlers can fetch all your website pages including future pages.
To submit a sitemap, go to Bing Webmaster Tools, under the Sitemaps section, click Submit a Sitemap and enter the location of your sitemap file (which usually looks like; http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml).
Quick note: You can also download the Bing XML Sitemap Plugin (which is free) to easily create a sitemap for your site so you can submit it to Bing Webmaster Tools.
How to Rank Higher On Bing in 2021: Top 5 Bing SEO Tips
So you want to learn how to rank your website #1 on Bing search results in 2021? Here are the 5 PROVEN Bing SEO tips you can implement today.
1. Pay Attention to On-Page SEO for Bing
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your website’s individual pages to get better rankings in search engines like Bing, Google, etc.
Did you know that you can get better rankings on Bing when you optimize your content for “Exact Match” keywords?
Let’s take an example.
When you search for a keyword term like “how to remove password from pdf”, Bing shows you the above-mentioned result that has the EXACT match keyword (word to word!).
Let’s compare the same example with Google.
As you can see above, Google is MORE focused on “context” rather than showing results with “EXACT match” keywords.
That’s why you should primarily understand searcher intent and optimize accordingly in order to rank well on Google.
But on Bing, you can use exact match keywords and still get better rankings. Just make sure your content is helpful and better than others. Otherwise, you’ll not rank higher in any search engine!
Here are a few on-page optimization tips to get higher rankings on Bing.
Include your target keyword in the title: The title tag is the most important tag that exists in the head section of each webpage. The title tag also tells search crawlers the “context” of the content.
So, it’s extremely important to include your primary keyword in the title tag. Make sure it’s relevant, specific, and matches the context of the content inside the webpage.
Meta description: Similar to the title tag, the meta description is also extremely important as it provides the description of what the page is about, and often shown in the search results under the title of the page.
Try to include your primary keyword in your meta description. Or you can also use a highly relevant keyword term that matches your primary keyword.
Header tags (from H1 to H6): Header tags are NOT as important as title tags or meta description but they definitely help with better on-page optimization and user experience.
You can use h2 or h3 tags as subheadings to include question keywords or other relevant keywords that match with your content.
Image optimization: Image SEO is one thing you should NEVER ignore. Make sure to include several images in every blog post you write to get better rankings on Bing. Also, don’t forget to include an image ALT tag by mentioning your primary keyword term.
Sprinkle relevant keywords throughout the content: Make sure to include your primary and other secondary relevant keywords throughout your content.
You don’t have to use the exact keyword repeatedly but adding relevant keywords multiple times can get you higher rankings on Bing. You can use keyword research tools like Semrush to quickly find profitable keywords in your niche.
2. Content is King
Be it, users, Google, Yahoo, or Bing – everyone loves great content.
Although there are hundreds of ranking factors taken into consideration by search engines to rank a webpage, only with high-quality content the ranking of a website can be optimized.
Want to boost your rankings on Bing or Google or any other search engine?
Create great content that adds value to your website users. Here’s how to do it right.
Bing loves fresh content
Bing officially said that it loves fresh content. It ranks web pages based on the content freshness.
What does it mean by “fresh content”?
Fresh content means that a website’s content has been updated or new content has been added regularly.
So if you’re running a new website, it’s a good idea to publish quality content more often. Or if you already have a ton of articles on your blog, it’s better to keep updating them regularly to attract more search traffic from Bing.
Make sure to submit your individual URLs using URL Submission from Bing Webmaster Tools whenever you update a post. That way, you can get your content indexed as soon as you update or publish it online.
Keep it relevant
Bing loves relevant content. Relevant content refers to how closely the content on a webpage matches the intent behind the search query.
Relevant is the content that your website audience finds useful, informative, engaging, or entertaining.
For example, if you were looking to target the keyword “best beaches in Goa”, you wouldn’t simply focus on synonyms like “best coast in Goa” or “best shore in Goa.”
You would create a list of relevant terms that match with that query, which might include “best places to visit in Goa”, “Goa beach vacations,” or “best beach in goa for family”.
Then, you create content that matches all those keyword terms. That’s how you can create RELEVANT content to get higher rankings on search engines like Bing.
One simple way to find such relevant keyword terms for your topics is to use “Related Searches on Bing”.
Here are the results for the above-mentioned example keyword.
As you can see above, you’ll see a bunch of related searches at the bottom of Bing’s search results page. You can also use tools like Semrush to find plenty of relevant keywords to create relevant content.
3. Improve User Experience to Get Higher Rankings on Bing
Impress people, not search engines.
If you keep that ONE thing in mind, you’ll start getting amazing results from search engines like Bing.
Most people often look for shortcuts or tactics to trick search engines to get faster results. They completely fail to understand the importance of providing a better experience to their website users.
No matter how hard you try to outsmart search engines, if your website’s user engagement is bad, you’re NOT going to get better search rankings.
Here are a few PROVEN ways to improve your website’s user experience to rank high on Bing.
Click through rates are extremely important
Click-through rate measures how often people who view a search result end up clicking on it.
Backlinko found that the #1 result in Google has a CTR of 31.7%.
According to their research, the #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7%. The same is the case with Bing search results as well.
#1 search results often generate more organic clicks. Also, the more organic clicks a particular search result generates, the rankings will go up for that search result.
For example, if you’re ranking in the second position for a keyword term but getting more organic clicks than the first search result, you’ll eventually replace the #1 position (from position 2).
Do you know why? Search engines including Bing (and Google) take organic clicks into consideration while ranking webpages.
So if the search engine bots notice more people are clicking on a particular search result, that page’s rankings will shoot up.
That’s why increasing your organic CTR (Click Through Rate) is important. Here are some quick tips to improve your website’s click-through rates.
- Write captivating headlines. Use headline generator tools if you want to come up with dozens of great headline ideas.
- Create engaging meta descriptions. Spend quality time writing them. Analyze your competitors’ top-ranking pages to see how they craft their titles and meta descriptions.
- Optimize your content for featured snippets
- Use descriptive URLs that contain your primary keyword term
Your website’s page load times matter a lot
Although the search engine giant Google never publicly released a statement saying it takes website speed into consideration while ranking a page, Bing did it.
As you can see above, Bing gave a hint that it takes faster page load speeds into account.
We all know that slow loading websites are bad.
Poor page load times can kill the user experience and it can lead a visitor to leave your website instantly to find information elsewhere. Don’t let the slow page load times kill your Bing rankings.
Here are two simple and fastest ways to boost your website page loading times.
- Move to a faster web host: The quickest way to improve your page load time is to use a faster web host. We’ve been using WPX Hosting for more than 5 years now and most of our pages take less than 1 second to load (and we use a ton of images in every post we publish). Thanks to the WPX cloud hosting platform as it delivers lightning-fast speeds.
- Install WP Rocket: WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin used for WordPress websites. This plugin helps you increase your website performance and overall page load times by offering features like lazy loading images, page caching, browser caching, and so on.
4. Higher Page Authority Sites Tend to Rank Better on Bing
Bing, like Google, prefers to show “high authority sites” in their search results.
What does it mean by high page authority sites? The sites that have a ton of backlinks from other sources.
Backlinks are often considered as positive votes by search engines. So if a page has a lot of backlinks, it will attract more search traffic. That’s why authority sites with huge backlinks often rank faster than new websites that barely have any links. It’s as simple as that.
If you’re wondering how you can improve your page authority and build quality links to your site, here are a few powerful tips for you.
Write guest posts for others
Even Bing officially recommends website owners to build links through guest blogging.
Guest blogging allows you to build quality and relevant links by writing content for other websites. There are a ton of free guest posting sites you can use to build natural links to your blog.
Use the skyscraper technique
Another popular technique used by many bloggers and SEOs is the skyscraper technique which was introduced by the SEO expert Brian Dean from Backlinko.
Here’s how the Skyscraper Technique works in three fundamental steps:
- Search for an article that performs well on search with a considerable amount of backlinks (use tools like Semrush to easily find such content)
- Create similar content, but make it 10 times better than the original piece of content
- Find people who linked to the original content and reach out to them to link to your 10x better content
You can also read our beginner’s guide to skyscraper technique to get more out of it.
5. Social Signals Influence Bing SEO
If your website’s content is widely shared by users across various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, it sends positive signals to search engines like Bing.
More social shares also indicate that a page is popular among users. It will ultimately improve your overall search rankings on Bing.
Just make sure you don’t follow social media schemes to artificially grow your social shares or followers (it might show a negative impact on your rankings in the long run).
Here are some effective tips to improve social signals to improve your website’s SEO.
Add more images to your content
According to Semrush research, blog posts with one image get twice as much traffic as posts containing text only.
These also get 30% more shares and 25% more backlinks.
Have a look;
So try to add at least one image for every blog post you publish (if not more). You can use free image editing tools like Canva to easily create images, infographics, etc.
Make your blog’s content sharing easy for users
One of the easiest ways to improve social shares on your posts is to add social sharing buttons.
Once you add social sharing buttons, your website readers can easily share your content across various social networks (if they find your content helpful).
Here’s how you can do it;
- Use a social sharing plugin like Social Snap (we’re also using the same at BloggersPassion) to easily add social sharing buttons
- Also, consider embedding tweets within your content so others can retweet while reading your content
Use These 5 Free Tools to Improve Bing SEO
Want to improve your website’s Bing SEO quickly? Here are 5 amazing free tools that you can use to get higher rankings in Bing search.
1. WordPress Plugin for URL Submission
This is a free WordPress plugin that helps you submit your WordPress site URLs to the Bing search index automatically. If you’re new to Bing, you should definitely consider installing this plugin.
Once you install this plugin, you can configure it with an API key generated from Bing Webmaster tools. Then, this plugin automatically detects page creation/update in WordPress and submits the URL to the Bing index.
2. Bing Mobile Friendliness Test Tool
Almost every major search engine including Bing, Google, and Yahoo takes mobile-friendliness into consideration while ranking a website. So it’s important for you to know whether your site is mobile responsive or not.
Bing offers a free mobile-friendliness test tool that tells you whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.
Visit the tool, enter your website’s URL and click on Analyze to see whether Bing views the page as mobile-friendly.
Here’s how it looks like;
A quick tip: You can use mobile-friendly WordPress themes such as GeneratePress or use free plugins such as WPTouch to make your site mobile responsive.
3. Bing Keyword Research Tool
Bing offers an incredible keyword research tool that helps you find relevant keywords, question keywords, newly found keywords along with the monthly impressions for each keyword. It’s absolutely free to use.
Let’s take an example keyword term “how much money do YouTubers make”.
Once you enter the keyword on Bing’s Keyword Research tool, you’ll instantly get a ton of data including;
- Impressions for that keyword (along with the popularity of that keyword over time)
- Global breakdown
- Related keywords and more
Here’s how it looks like;
The best part about using the Bing Keyword Research tool is that you can list keyword ideas in three different ways including;
- Related keywords
- Question keywords
- Newly discovered keywords
Have a look;
When you scroll down further, you’ll also get a list of all the top 10 URLs ranking on this keyword.
Notice that, we’re currently ranking #3 (ahead of Forbes) for the same example keyword on Bing search results.
4. Site Scan Tool from Bing
Using the Site Scan tool from Bing, you can improve your website performance not only on Bing but on other search engines such as Google as well.
This is a FREE site audit tool from Microsoft Bing which crawls your website and checks for common technical SEO issues such as;
- Missing title tags
- Missing meta descriptions
- Lengthy title tags
- Images without ALT tags
- Server timeouts and so on
Here’s how it looks like;
Make sure to run your website using their Site Scan tool regularly to find and fix all your website’s technical issues to improve its rankings.
A quick note: If you’re looking to get in-depth data on your site’s SEO and technical issues, we highly recommend the Site Audit tool from Semrush. It’s the same tool we use.
5. SEO Reports from Bing
Are you looking for page-level recommendations to get better rankings on Bing? Then, you should definitely try the SEO Reports from Bing. It’s a free SEO analyzer tool from Bing.
As you can see above, this tool identifies all the errors found across the entire website scanned. So you can start fixing those issues (or errors) to improve your website’s SEO.
FAQs About Bing SEO for Beginners
Here are some of the frequently asked questions around Bing SEO for beginners.
Is Bing a popular search engine?
Yes, Bing is a popular search engine. According to StatCounter, Bing is the second-largest search engine by market share in the US. Bing currently has a 6.25% market share in the US.
How does Bing rank your website?
Bing mostly ranks those websites that often publish quality, relevant and fresh content. If your content also attracts social shares and backlinks from other sites, your pages will get #1 rankings on Bing search results.
Are backlinks important for Bing SEO?
Absolutely yes. Backlinks are important for Bing SEO because they signal to search engines like Bing that another site finds your content helpful enough to link to it within their own content. The more backlinks you attract from various sources, the higher your content ranks.
Is Bing Webmaster free to use?
Yes, Bing webmaster tools are free to use. You can either use your Microsoft free account or Facebook account to sign up for the Bing webmaster tools. Once you create an account, you can then add your site and verify the website ownership to start using those tools and get important metrics such as website stats, crawl issues, and more.
Do social shares help Bing SEO?
Yes, Bing considers social media signals such as Facebook shares, tweets, etc to rank a web page in its index. Higher social shares also indicate better user experience – so a page with thousands of social shares gets better rankings when compared to a page with fewer social shares.
Final Thoughts on Bing SEO Guide for Beginners
Do you optimize your website for Bing SEO? If not, you could be leaving a ton of organic traffic and money on the table.
If you’re already getting traffic from Google, you’ll find it easier to optimize for Bing. So why not target Bing as well to get more organic traffic to your website?
So what are your thoughts on Bing SEO? Do you want to optimize your website for both Bing and Google? If you’ve any questions, let us know in the comments.
Anil Agarwal who owns Bloggerspassion.com, is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable blogs for over a decade. Bloggers Passion has been featured on premium online sites like Forbes.com, Huffingtonpost, Semrush, Problogger, Crazy Egg, The Next Web and so on.
Keep reading the article at BloggersPassion: Learn Blogging & SEO from Anil Agarwal. The article was originally written by Anil Agarwal on 2021-02-10 07:41:27.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.