Bing SEO: How To Rank On Bing In 2024

Everybody is talking about ranking on Google…Which is highly competitive. What if I tell you that you can get up to millions of free visitors from Bing as well?

That’d be pretty awesome, right?

For you…In this post, I’m going to explain you an exciting thing called Bing SEO, and how you can dominate the first page of Bing.

Before anything else, let me put first things first and let you know what Bing actually is for those of you don’t know.

It is a search engine operated and owned by Microsoft that allows people to search for various things just like Google.

Well, you know that there are billions of queries held on Google [3.5 billion searches a day] each and every day and also that it covers over 80% of the search engine market share. But, do you know that Bing is also taking up?

Its market share has been increasing significantly. People are still using it and it’s driving millions of visitors.

There are about 388 million searches held on Bing every day.

That’s still a decent amount, isn’t it?

This is why you should definitely go about practicing Bing SEO and try to rank on there for the better.

Now, to give you some more context, let me answer the ‘why’ question descriptively.

Why Bing Matters?

That being said, Bing is an important part of the search engine world…There are quite a few statistics with me that I want to share with you.

Number one:

Look at the report of top search engines in the world which shows that Bing shares 4.81% of the total search engine market share in the first quarter of 2019.

Bing SEO statistics. Bing shares about 5%e of the total search engine market share.

From there, there’s been a great growth of the search engine.

The statistics for you are right below…It’s moved from 4.81% to over 5.91%.

Which is great.

You should do Bing SEO because Bing has grown to 6% in just a few months.

You might consider taking some out time for this nifty search engine now.

Number two:

If you make a good brand on Bing, you can be rewarded with more sitelinks than Google provides.

[This could be really helpful to demonstrate your value as a company.]

Doing Bing SEO matters because you get chances to build a better brand.

Number three:

Bing is powering over 51% of Yahoo searches because of the deal held in 2009. This means over half of the search results of Yahoo depend on Bing’s indexing and its algorithms.

So, you get to enjoy the traffic from both the search engines as you’ll rank well on both of them. This is like a cherry on the cake.

Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo deal in 2009.

Number four:

Competition is still very low on the side of Bing. Most of the marketers and SEOs are focusing to rank on Google because it’s popular now.

I think people stick to one thing and when it collapses, they face mysterious adversity.

You can’t be sure that Google won’t ever go out of business despite being a user-first company. Just think about Tumblr…One decision made its value from tens of billions to even less than 3 million dollars.

So you’ve got to focus on both in order to do well.

Number five:

A recent study from Matthew Woodward found that:

Bing has high-quality traffic as it converts better than the traffic generated from Google.

Bing's traffic converts better than Google's traffic.

Its traffic also has a low bounce rate, spends more time and visit more pages on a site, and clicks more affiliate links.

Number six:

Bing loves SEO.

They have clear cut and easy to understand algorithms to help SEOs rank well.

Also, they offer a bunch of free tools to analyze your site completely as reactions are inspected in a science laboratory [By the way, I don’t like science].

Okay, I think now you’ve got the notion of why you should be doing Bing SEO and using it as your traffic channel in the present year.

Let’s jump to the differences and similarities between the two leading search sites.

Differences Between Bing and Google

What are the differences between Bing and Google.

It’s time to talk about the differences.

Let’s dive right in!

Mobile Friendliness

Google is highly focusing on mobile-friendliness nowadays. So, if yourr site isn’t mobile-friendly with Google, you’re done for.

In fact, they have proudly declared that they now practice mobile-first indexing.

Mobile friendliness guidelines by Google.

Now you can see that Bing also emphasizes mobile but is quite lenient. You can rank well even if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

Bing is right now not focusing on Mobile Friendliness.

Social Signals

We know that Google also focuses a bit (just a bit) on social signals but Bing has clearly outlined that they consider social signals as their ranking factor.

In other words, if you get a good amount of shares, likes, and comments, you tend to do pretty well with Bing.

Bing SEO comprises of social signals.

Just remember…Every share counts [that’s a nice fit].

Keywords Match Focus

Bing SEO is mostly about focusing on the keywords.

Google is a smart company. It understands the intent of the searcher (as much as it can) via machine learning and gives the best appropriate results. They also pick up synonyms of the keyword that the users are searching for and add to the queue.

Bing is not that mature in this game right now. It’ll only show up the exact keyword a user searched for. Hence, disregarding the intent behind the query.

I searched for the term ‘seo‘ in both search engines and got totally shocking results.

You can see the snapshots of the comparison right below…

A search on Google to inspect results.
This one is from Google.

You can see the results in Google above.

Now, let’s try in Bing…

Bing is only targetting results that are keyword based.

You see the difference?

It’ll show up the best keyword matches in the results straight away.

But wait, it’s still evolving and Microsoft’s team is working on it every single day.

Internal Pages

Bing ranks only the homepage and it's harder to rank internal pages with it.

According to Landerapp.com, Bing doesn’t rank (high) internal pages like contact, services, and blog whereas Google tries to rank each and every page of a site.

I think the sentence has been a bit unclear.

Here’s what I mean by this:

Instead of your site’s internal pages, Bing will rank the home page. So, you can struggle to get good rankings of your internal pages.

[That’s not good, right?]

Flash Content

Bing has the ability to read flash content.

Well, Google is still developing in indexing flash content and as it’s only capable of indexing text-based content in the present.

Bing is a smart executor in this. It understands, reads, and favors engaging flash content.

I think you should give a round of applause for such a nice feature.

[That’s a nice joke…Thanks in advance for your standing ovation.]

Pro Tip: Still, you need to get rid of flash because it can hurt your Google rankings (which can be a total disaster).

Old Vs. New Pages

We all know that Google really likes fresh and updated content. Also, that it ranks new links at the top for they present new information to their users.

But the story with Bing is a bit different. It ranks older pages at the top instead of new ones.

Bing will index and rank old pages higher.

They want only sites that have the rapport to rank in the list first.

Great! These are the differences…and we’ve covered them. It’s time to look at the similarities.

Similarities Between Bing And Google

Similarities between Bing and Google.

Brands Always Dominate

Both search engines favor brands. Big brands are provided more value and ranked higher than non-brands. If you’re not familiar with what a brand means to a search engine…Here’s a sweet explanation.

The sites that have high authority backlinks have great content, get more queries with the site’s actual name (example ‘Shivansh Bhanwariya Digital’), and have a great domain authority are brands in the eyes of search engines.

And that’s what Google and Bing [Or any other search site out there] love.

You have to build a brand in order to do well on both Bing and Google.

Also, here’s a quote I read and consider all the time and you should too.

If Opportunity Doesn’t Come Knocking At Your Door, Build A Brand.

– Bernard Kelvin Clive
Backlinks are really important for ranking.

Both Google and Bing consider backlinks as their important ranking factor and value site that earn more high-authority backlinks.

If you don’t know what backlinks are, you can check out my digital marketing guide where I’ve illustrated everything about them.

So, if you have more (again, high-authority) backlinks, you tend to do better on Bing as well as Google both.

We all know about Google…Here’s a guideline from Bing.

Quality Vs. Quantity of backlinks by BIng.

Both Provide Free SEO Tools

All the search engines provides free tools to measure performance. Bing and Google also do that.

Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools.

Not specifically the two search engines, but every engine out there provides a range of free tools to check your site’s SEO and analyze the performance.

You can check out Google’s webmaster tools here.

Bing webmaster tools could be accessed right here.

Local SEO

Focus on Local SEO and you'll do well with all the search engines.

Both platforms care about and seek for local search. So, if you develop a locally targeted SEO for your content or site, you’ll receive amazing rewards and do fantastically nice in the long run.

That’s all for similarities and differences. Now let’s turn the pages and initiate an understanding about Bing SEO to drive visitors.

Learning Bing SEO To Optimize Your Site

Practicing the real Bing SEO.

There are not many things you need to do to do well on Bing which is different from Google. I’ll start from the most basic things first and then we’ll move to some specific features that you need to take care of while doing Bing SEO.

Let’s get in…Straight away.

Step 1: Create Amazing [In-Depth] Content

Write super in-depth and amazing content for doing good.

No matter what you say, creating long in-depth content is always the key to do well. Content is the king whether you’re already a big brand or you’re just starting out with zero balance and experience.

Still, what do I exactly mean by amazing content?

According to me – amazing content is the content that satisfies a user and makes search engines happy.

Hmm…How can you make a search engine happy?

I laugh whenever I think about it. The answer is right below…

Content that makes a user happy is the one that makes a search engine happy.

Let’s leave the fun. What I mean by this is that you need to write long-form of content with lots of added value.

Here’s a guideline from Bing…

Bing's guidelines about content.

You absolutely want to go so much above and beyond that someone might not even dare to visit your competitors’ content. Like, have professional and custom designs, use copywriting within the posts, user CTAs, and make it easy for the reader/consumer to read/consume.

When you do this constantly, you’ll get a ton of backlinks over time, a ton of social shares, and referrals which will then boost your overall ranking by adding up altogether.

And ultimately you know that backlinks are an important consideration for a site’s ranking.

Also, a study from Backlinko shows that a long-form of content generates more backlinks.

Long form of content generates more backlinks over time.

The conclusion is…Writing 2,000 plus words posts (most of the time when it could be written), and the formatting it in the best way possible.

The science is this: The longer your content is…the more keywords you have in there and you tend to make it up.

You’ll surely see results with Bing as they’ve clearly mentioned this. Also, you get good consequences with this on every search engine.

Here’s a comparison chart (from searchmetrics.com) of Bing and Google behaving to keywords.

Keyword focus by Bing and Google both.

Step 2: Add Multimedia (A Ton Of) In Your Content

Add multimedia to your content.

Bing loves multimedia from a long ago. Also, it has better capabilities to interpret multimedia than Google.

So, you have to make sure you’re adding plenty of (relevant) images, videos, animations, GIFs, and graphics to your content.

It has been seen that content that is rich in media, ranks really well in Bing results.

Take care of that, okay?

Step 3: More Focus On Meta Title And Description Plus URL

As you know that Bing is still dependent on keywords match, you have to use your targeted keywords in your meta title, your meta description, and URL.

The more keywords you have in three of them, the better you be off.

Just look at the instance below…

Bing SEO Tip: Use More keywords.

Whoa…Wait grasshopper! Don’t just stuff a lot of keywords as you can lose your Google rankings in the process.

Just be wise with your implementation and it’ll be all right.

Step 4: Mobile Optimization [It’ll Be A Vital Part In Bing SEO Soon]

Just because Bing in lenient with its mobile optimization, doesn’t mean that you’re going to kill it even after five years. More than 80% of people are using mobile devices.

What do you think the future is going to look like?

Like what?

You may like it or not, optimizing for mobile will be the most significant requirement just like Google has initiated it.

If you’re still confused, I’ve got a forecast of the number of people using mobile phones.

Mobile users statistics. There will be over 7 billion mobile users by 2023. There are over 6 billion in 2019.

I think it’s clear at your side now…

Step 5: Make Categories And Use Tags

Creating categories and adding tags makes it super easy for big search sites to make your content discoverable, readable, and crawlable.

If you’re using WordPress, it’s a no brainer to create categories and add tags to each post.

Just go to your settings and add the tags you think you need.

Like this…

Add categories to your site.
Adding Categories In WordPress
Add tags to each of your post.
Adding Tags In WordPress

That’s what you do. All these categories and tags provide a picture of what your site is all about.

Thus, it helps in building your authority.

Step 6: Let Bing Know About Your Site

You can’t just sit around and wait for things to happen. Once you have everything set up neatly, go ahead and let Bing know about your site right away.

You can do this by navigating to Bing Webmaster Tools (something I’ve used over and over in the post), connect it with your Google Search Console, and then start submitting URLs.

Submit your site for indexing to Bing.

Great, this is all you need to know about Bing SEO.

You do these things repeatedly, with patience, hard work, and smart work…It’s going to work.

Just give some time to your brain to relax and watch the steady progress.

Is There Anything Else You Can Include In Your Bing SEO Checklist?

A hundred percent, yes!

Besides doing the easy-peasy things, you also need to spend time with your marketing.

What Neil recommends is that you should spend 40% of your time creating and 60% marketing it.

You can actually do this and it’ll assist you a lot.

Here’s a guide that’ll teach you about marketing or promoting your content the right way.

And last but not least, a video from Neil himself about Bing SEO.

That’s that for now.

What Are Your Biggest Takeaways From This Post? Let Me Know In The Comments. Also, Are You Using Bing As Your Channel To Visitors? If Yes, How Satisfied You Are…

[FAQs] Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bing Really Worth It?

For sure, Bing is becoming really popular and driving millions of visitors every month. You should consider it as one of your marketing channels.

Is It Easy To Rank On Bing?

It is easier to rank on Bing compared to Google because the competition is very low because marketers have been ignoring it.

How Much Traffic Can Bing Drive?

According to Ahrefs, Bing gets more than 300 million searches per day. So, if you rank well, you can experience a decent chunk of traffic. Also, if you rank well in Bing, you automatically rank well on Yahoo as Bing powers over 50 percent of Yahoo searches.

Is Bing SEO Hard?

Not at all, the methods and guidelines are clearly mentioned and easy to understand. If won’t take you much longer to rank if you do everything right.

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