Bing became operational in June 2009 and is the second-largest search engine today. With nearly 3.5 billion searches per day - there is no denying the fact that Google tops the list in the world of search engines. Bing search engine also has come a long way in search engine optimization and accounts for nearly an 82.6million searches per day. This article will discuss what Bing SEO is and how it can help improve your organic click-through rate, boost conversion rate, etc.
Bing accounts for nearly 26.5% of all desktop searches in the US. With an increasing number of organic search listings, businesses of all sizes wish their websites rank to be on top in the SERPs. So, the focus is mainly on Google for search engine optimization(SEO) marketing. However, with a proper link-building technique, SEO audit, SEO plan & strategy, keyword search, etc., you must also consider Bing search engine to reach out to the target audience. In the Bing search engine, as the competition to target potential customers is slightly less than Google, Bing SEO helps generate leads to your website, build brand awareness, etc., which ultimately leads to increasing online sales.
What is Bing SEO
The Bing network is the group of search engines and search services powered by Bing that includes Microsoft sites. After Microsoft launched its search engine, it has gone through several names: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and now is known as Bing. Bing search engine has its users in the US. However, many other English-speaking countries also use Bing search. Yahoo and AOL.
Bing SEO is the process of optimizing images, updating content, etc., to improve your website ranking in the organic search results. Bing is not a large search engine compared to Google but has a great market share in many countries, particularly in the US. Some of the salient features of using Bing for SEO marketing are listed below:
A. There is less competition on Bing compared to Google. With a better SEO plan & strategy, you can target the relevant audience to reach your website and take the intended action.
B. You can get better rankings on Bing using the target keywords for relevant times on your page.
C. Bing also powers the Yahoo search engine. It means if you optimize your website for Bing, you are also optimizing for Yahoo.
D. Bing has a great image search functionality. So, by optimizing the images, you can target the relevant users to take the intended action.
Ins and out of Bing SEO
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1. Backlinks - Backlinks are essential for SEO ranking as they represent a “vote of confidence” from one website to another. In SEO ranking, getting quality links from authoritative websites is of utmost importance. The number of online platforms is growing rapidly and it is not easy to advertise everywhere. With the help of backlinks, you can get make the target audience reach your website. It also helps build brand awareness and increase the customers' trust.
Bing browser provides you with the option to get links from many relevant websites. As the number of users on Bing is less than Google, with a better website ranking, you can have an increased number of backlinks. When you get links from other websites, the users feel that if they are being redirected from one place to another, the product or services being offered would be trustworthy.
If multiple sites link to the same web page or website in the Bing search, it boosts your brand recognition, increases traffic on the website, etc. To have an improved SEO ranking, getting important links (meaning the user takes the intended action) is of prime concern for businesses using Bing advertising. You also need to focus that your site does not get links from irrelevant websites as this would lower your website ranking. With backlink analysis, you get to know from which websites you are getting the user to your webpage.
You can prepare a Bing SEO report to figure out how the campaign's performance. Links from sites labeled as organic, such as .edu, .org, etc., will help your site index better. Social media marketing could be of great help in Bing SEO to get quality backlinks. Getting your links from older websites is an effective strategy because Bings reads the domain’s age as trustworthy and authoritative. Some of the advantages of backlinks in the Bing search are:
• Improve organic rankings
• Fast indexing
• Raises brand awareness
• Boosts referral traffic
• Positions your business as an authority
• Establishes relationships between websites.
2. On - page SEO - On-page SEO means that you have to deal with various elements on your website. The factors to consider in your Bing search SEO are - technical set up of the webpage, textual and visual content, site speed, optimizing for mobile devices, user-friendly website, etc. You should also have great content on the webpage and an eye-catching call to action to make the relevant user move down the marketing funnel. Some of the essential on-page SEO factors you should focus on are:
• Technical excellence - You should focus on having a website encompassing all the technical points related to your product or services. You should focus on proper crawling and indexing. You should also make sure that your website opens up smoothly after the user clicks on the Bing search. The page should be indexable so that it is indexed in the Bing search engine, which means that you are not blocking your post, images or complete website.
• Excellent content - The content is the main point that conveys your message virtually to the target audience. So, the content should be written appropriately that conveys the message easily to the visitor. You can consider dividing your paragraphs into different sections to engage the user’s interest.
• Flawless user experience - This should be a top priority in your Bing SEO. The most crucial point in Bing advertising is user experience so that the visitor does not have a second thought to move ahead on the website. You should focus on the fact that the user needs to understand your website easily. The interface should be easy to understand and the visitor should easily be able to find what they are looking for. The user should know where they would be redirected and what necessary steps they would have to take to complete the intended action.
In your SEO marketing strategy, you should focus on using high-traffic keywords in headings, subheadings, URL tags and also the first paragraph of the content. Bing SEO also prioritizes the domains with exact keyword matches. If it is performing well, it does not necessarily mean that you should change or adapt your domain based on this. The important point to focus on in Bing SEO is that it reads and prioritizes content with exact keyword matching in:
• Titles of pages, keep it to 160-characters maximum
• Meta descriptions, keep it to 150-characters maximum
• Considers the web page content
3. Off-page SEO - Off-page SEO refers to techniques you can use to improve the website ranking on the Bing search. Off-page SEO has many points to deal with in promoting your website content for a position on the Bing search engine. Be it any online platform used for advertising, you always wish to be able to perform remarketing to get in touch with the audience that left the website without taking any intended action. To achieve this, many on-page and off-page SEO techniques are applied so that none of your target audience is left untouched.
After studying consumer behavior, you can optimize images, include short-eye-catching product videos, relevant call to action, etc., to keep the user's interest engaged so that they navigate through different sections on the landing page to take the intended action.
A high-quality website is more likely to have reference from other websites, have brand mentions on social media and is more likely to be shared among like-minded users, friends, etc., helping in peer-to-peer marketing. Some of the salient features of off-page SEO in Bing search are:
• Increase in page rank - Page rank is another important point for a better SEO ranking. It helps to show the most relevant results to the user after they have entered the keyword or search terms in the Bing search.
• Greater exposure - Higher website ranking in the Bing search engine also means greater exposure. It improves impression share, increases traffic to the website and has more social media mentions. Just as Google uses EAT (Expertise, Authority and trustworthiness) as an essential factor in SEO ranking, Bing search engine also has various algorithm and ranking factors.
• Improves website ranking - The most crucial advantage of off-page SEO is it helps in improving the website ranking.
4. Great content - Whether you are working on PPC advertising or inducing SEO marketing techniques to achieve your target goals, you will have in common to work on producing great content. With Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc., the content on the landing page should be in relevance with the ad. Similarly, in Bing search, you should focus that the content on the website matches the search term entered by the user. It helps increase the user's trust that the product or services being offered are trustworthy and improves website ranking.
In the digital era, you also need to focus on easily scannable and readable content. The content should illustrate various points of your SEO website. The critical point here to focus on is that you should consider quality and not the quantity of the content. The content should be crisp and crystal-clear about your product or offerings. However, if your business requires to be more descriptive, you must consider it. E.g., e-commerce companies have a wide range of products. So writing a great product page description is of prime focus. They need to optimize images as various sections of the product need to be displayed to boost e-commerce conversion rate. If you are an e-commerce company that wants to boost brand awareness, contact a digital marketing company that offers content marketing services. They will write high-quality content to increase your website visibility and promote your product & services to potential customers.
5. Bing webmaster tool - Another important point to know about in Bing SEO is the Bing webmaster tools. By properly using the webmaster tool, you would know about the exact number of clicks your webpage gets.
With the use of this tool, you can get insights into user intent, identify the top-performing keywords that your website ranks for, etc. It helps you know the area that needs to be worked on to achieve the Bing advertising goals. You may consider optimizing domains, referring pages, anchor texts, etc. After scanning the website, you get to know the technical SEO issues and then take the necessary steps to improve them, like bounce rate, average time on page, average session duration, etc.
The webmaster area allows you to analyze how your SEO campaign is performing by analyzing some of the important SEO metrics. The several entities to focus on in Bing SEO are:
• Keyword research
• SEO report
• Website crawling and indexing
• Backlinks
Why is SEO important for Bing?
To target the organic traffic to your web page, you must consider Bing advertising after Google. Bing is the search engine by Microsoft. On 29 July 2009, Bing and yahoo got together. So, Bing search now also provides you with the opportunity to display results on yahoo. It means that you cannot miss the chance to get in touch with the users across these platforms.
Bing SEO is unique in its way, as you mostly have users who look for the product or services located in the United States. Though, it does not mean that you do not need to optimize your SEO marketing strategy for all other countries. In the digital advertising world, you have the best advantage to target users all across the globe and you should always be ready to get in touch with them. When working on Bing SEO, you need to be clear about the target audience and implement your SEO plan & strategy accordingly. Bing SEO provides you with the option to target users on their location. You should also consider targeting the users based on demographic location so that the displayed results are relevant to the keywords or search terms entered.
Bing ranking factors
The SEO marketing done for any search engine has a high chance of paying off the desired results when they appear on top in the SERPs. Bing search also considers some of the most critical factors to display the results. Some of the important ranking factors to consider in Bing advertising are discussed below:
• Relevance - This factor is important in your SEO marketing strategy to ensure that the relevant audience has the same product or services as displayed in the Bing search. You may have various sections, sub-sections, etc., that rank on the Bing search for the search term. So, you must consider adding the relevant page link to your SEO website. According to Bing, it is measured mainly by analyzing the matching words on the webpage, text displayed, synonyms and abbreviations.
• Credibility - Bing analyzes the reputation of the page itself. The more the credibility of your website is for Bing, the higher are chances for your SEO website to appear on the search result page. With this credibility on the SEO website, Bing ranks the website on the search results with its artificial intelligence and algorithm.
• User satisfaction - The ultimate goal of SEO marketing is to satisfy the users so that they are also interested in taking the intended action in the future. Bing also takes into account user satisfaction considering the relevance of the content and context on the website. It also decides user satisfaction based on the time the user spends on the page, bounce rate, etc.
• Freshness of content - Bing welcomes fresh content for any product description. It also engages visitors to your website to take the intended action. They believe that your product or services are entirely different from your competitors.
• Location - Bing advertising provides you with the opportunity to get in touch with the users based on their location. It also uses location as a ranking factor to make sure that the location-based search results are relevant or not.
• Page load time - The more time a page takes to load, the higher are the chances of the user leaving the webpage. Bing takes this into account to rank a website. You should focus on improving the page load speed to reduce the bounce rate of your website.
• Mobile-friendly website - Since the launch of mobile-first indexing by Google, most websites that use Google for SEO focus on having a mobile-friendly website. In the same way, you must have your website optimized for mobile devices for the Bing search. The number of mobile users is increasing globally. So, having a mobile-friendly website increases your chances of getting in touch with the relevant user 24/7. With this, the user can avail of your product or services just at the ease of fingertip.
Round off
Any savvy advertiser will find it useful to target the users on Google and Bing. Bing, although with less number of users, provides you with a potential audience with very high chances of taking the intended action. If you are already getting organic traffic from Google, you must also consider SEO marketing for Bing search. Optimizing for Bing would assure you that you do not miss out on many potential audiences and leave money on the table. If you find the SEO optimization process for Bing difficult, you can get in touch with a digital marketing company. The experts have experience in local SEO, SEO analytics, SEO keyword research, e-commerce SEO, white label SEO, link building, SEO audit service, etc. that can help you increase the conversion rate and boost revenue.
References:
• The ultimate guide to Bing SEO
• Search engine land’s guide to Bing SEO