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Ayup! This article covers everything you need to know about how SEO works in Bing. From optimising your website and Places for Business profile to expanding your reach across the web. It’s all right here!
The world of SEO is going through some pretty dramatic changes right now. Google, while still being the dominant player, is losing a fair chunk of its market share to various fresh-faced competitors.
Additionally, AI is disrupting the way we search online. ChatGPT’s search function is the new way many folks acquire the information they need. And this, my friend, is where optimising your content for Bing comes in…
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How SEO Works in Bing
With all of the SEO chaos and carnage engulfing our workflow, one underdog is quietly reaping the rewards. Bing. Everyone’s talking about it again!
The search engine that nobody uses is, quite surprisingly, back on the radar. Its relevance circles back to AI-powered search. Furthermore, when we consider the desktop/laptop share of over 10%, that’s way too many potential clients or customers to disregard.
Yes, it will drive less traffic to your site than Google (for now), but as a business, you certainly can’t ignore it.
Bing currently has a 3.42% share of the worldwide search engine market.
In the desktop search engine market, Bing has a global market share of 10.5%. Bing’s share of the desktop search market has grown by 63.04% since 2021, increasing from 6.44%.
Top tip – Bing is a lot less crowded. Most of your competitors won’t even be optimising for the platform yet. As a result, it’s much easier to rank well. Here’s everything you need to know to do just that.
1. Powered by Bing
Firstly, it’s important to realise that when we optimise a website for Bing, we’ll also appear in a variety of other useful corners of the internet.
Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, AOL and Ecosia are just a few of the search engines powered by Bing. Again, not a huge user base, but I’m definitely noticing an increase in website visits from most of the above.
More importantly, ChatGPT Search uses Bing as a primary source of information to fuel its results. Boom! And there it is. If you want to show up on ChatGPT Search, you need to be indexed on Bing.
You’re probably already seeing website visits from AI search tools, and this trend will continue to rise.
Microsoft Bing is central to how ChatGPT Search works. While it uses various sources, Bing is currently a major driving force. It is a huge data source that helps the AI deliver current and accurate information. Thanks to Bing’s index, ChatGPT gives users the latest details on various topics.
Neil Patel recently posted on X: Which AI platform provides the best quality traffic? It’s obvious that ChatGPT is going to drive the most traffic. The post also explores conversion rates and was accompanied by this rather interesting visual chart. Food for thought.
2. Exact Match Keywords
Secondly, when you start to plan out your Bing strategy, know that it loves exact match keywords. For example, a page with small-business-accountant-derby in the URL, page title and meta description (as well as optimising the rest of the page and images for the keyword) would likely rank well for that particular search term.
This certainly makes things a little easier when it comes to growing your online presence. While Google is busy trying to match similar keywords to produce more varied results, Bing keeps it simple.
With this in mind, optimise your pages and posts for very specific search terms.
3. High-Quality, Original Content
Unsurprisingly, Bing, as with Google, wants to see high-quality content on your website. The demand for original content will only increase as the web is filled with AI slop.
Consider writing about unique ways that your business is building its products or services, adding data and statistics from your own company, alternative takes, or writing about non-industry standards.
For this reason, along with adding my own unique opinions, thoughts and tutorials, it’s a no-brainer for search engines to rank the content highly.
Make it unique. Do not reuse content from other sources. Content on your page must be unique in its final form. If you choose to host content from a third party, either use the canonical tag (rel=”canonical” to identify the original source or use the alternate tag (rel=”alternate”) .
4. User Engagement & Social Signals
User engagement and social signals are another key ingredient of how SEO works in Bing. How people react when they’re on your page, including how long they spend there, is all taken into account.
What’s more, social signals such as shares, likes, and the authoritativeness of your social media profiles all come into play.
Basically, Bing will consider the popularity of both your content and your accounts when determining the ranking of your web pages and posts.
With this in mind, it’s important to spend some time building your social media presence and engagement. As a result, this will help with your overall online visibility.
5. Sitemap, Backlinks, Technical, On & Off-Page SEO
I’ve bundled this little lot together because there’s nothing that you really need to do any differently.
Follow the common best practices that you would for Google. Again, Bing prefers exact match keywords, so keep this in mind with your on-page SEO.
If you’re a WordPress user, I can highly recommend Yoast. This is a free plugin with the option to upgrade to the premium version for a yearly fee.
Yoast will do a lot of the hard work for you in the background, including your sitemap. Furthermore, it provides a handy guide for each page and post on your site. A valuable addition to your SEO toolkit.
Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Bing about URLs on your site that would be otherwise hard to discover by our web crawlers. You can submit your sitemaps to your Bing Webmaster Tools account in any of these formats:
- XML Sitemap
- RSS 2.0
- Atom 0.3 and 1.0
- Text (a plain text file containing one URL per line)
6. Bing Places for Business
Next, if you’re a local business, Bing Places for Business is the equivalent of your Google Business Profile.
If you have either a brick-and-mortar address or service area, you can set up a Places for Business profile for extra visibility.
This is an extremely useful online business listing. As with a Google Business Profile, Bing Places allows you to show up in the local map results.
In many instances, these will show up before the standard results, meaning you’re above first place. The holy land of position zero.
You’ve probably already set up a Google Business Profile. If so, transferring all of your information over to Bing is a doddle. Log in with your Google account, and it will prompt you to import your listing.
As you can see in the example above, it’s an almost identical layout to Google. However, fewer of your competitors are on Bing, making it much easier to bag one of those all-important spots in the map pack.
The same as your Google Business Profile, keep your Bing listing up-to-date. Add more content, info and images regularly, as well as making use of their announcements (similar to posts on Google).
7. Bing Webmaster Tools
If you want to learn more about how SEO works in Bing, Webmaster Tools is the, erm, tool for you. It’s the Microsoft equivalent of Google Search Console.
Here, you can track and observe valuable data about your website. But wait, it doesn’t end there. View your backlinks, conduct keyword research, view any SEO errors, and conduct a full scan of your site. Really rather useful, I’d say.
Bing SEO Bonus – IndexNow
By streamlining the indexing process and reducing dependency on traditional web crawlers, IndexNow is setting a new standard in SEO efficiency, offering a faster, more effective way to optimize your digital presence.
For faster indexing, Bing uses a tool called IndexNow. This means your content will be served up in the search results much quicker than if you wait for a crawler to discover it.
Yoast offers IndexNow as part of its premium upgrade. Alternatively, WordPress users have the option of the free IndexNow plugin. Disclaimer: I’ve not used this plugin, and the reviews are questionable, to say the least.
How SEO Works in Bing – Conclusion
With its rising popularity and relevance, Bing is certainly a search engine to spend some time and attention on.
Its lower share in the search market means you’ll bring in less traffic than Google. However, this shouldn’t be seen as a downside. If anything, I’d see this as a positive.
Less competition and easier to rank well? Yes, please! As Bing also powers other search engines such as Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo, its importance goes way beyond the platform itself.
Arguably, the most exciting development here is Bing’s integration with ChatGPT. The foundations are all in place for a seismic shift in the world of SEO. Ensuring your business is indexed on Bing means you’ll also enjoy the benefits of showing up on ChatGPT.
Local businesses can also benefit from the extra visibility that a Bing Places for Business profile provides. This works the same way as a Google Business Profile and can help you rank at the top of the map results (the map pack).
Thanks for stopping by…
Ayup! My name’s Mike Hindle. I’m a WordPress sustainability professional with eleven years of experience and the owner here at Clearcut Derby.
I specialise in low-carbon websites that achieve maximum online presence with minimal environmental impact. If I had to be an animal, I’d be an elephant.