Bing SEO is about how to optimize your website for Bing. It differs from what you already know as Search Engine Optimization for any other search engine, but it partially borrows some of the techniques you already know. If you read this article, you are likely already familiar with Google SEO so you will notice some resemblance between Bing SEO and Google SEO. But Bing is another search engine for you to understand its principles to optimize your website.
Bing is a search engine created by Microsoft that allows you to search for web pages, news, products, and images. It was previously known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search. When it was called MSN Search, you could also search for groups or articles on Microsoft’s encyclopedia, Encarta. It is ‘responsible’ for less than 7% of the total searches, but we expect this to drastically change shortly following the ChatGPT integration into the latest Bing.
This article will discuss how Bing SEO can optimize websites, boost search rankings, and grow businesses. Interested? Let’s dive into the subject!
What is Bing SEO?
Bing SEO is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy that focuses on optimizing your website for Bing. In other words, Bing SEO helps your website grow faster in terms of organic traffic and gets higher in SERPs – Search Engine Ranking Positions.
SEO for Bing uses strategies like keyword research, link building, and content writing to boost your website’s visibility and ranking for the Bing search algorithm. So far, it resembles its bigger brother, the almighty Google, right? Moreover, SEO for Bing is centred on producing high-quality content relevant to the user’s query and maximizing user engagement, both of which are factors in Bing’s ranking algorithm.
One detail here: focusing on exact-match keywords to boost your site’s SEO for Bing increases the likelihood that it will appear in search results. From this perspective, for experienced SEO specialists, Bing seems like Google in its first decades.
You can ensure that your company is visible in Bing’s search results by using the proper SEO Bing strategy, focusing on exact-match keywords and (you guessed!) exact-match domains. The last one, one of the weak points of Google years ago, still works for Bing. Wanna rank in Bing as the “greatest SEO agency in the world”? You might want to try buying the exact domain: greatestseoagencyintheworld.com. You might be surprised by how easy it will be to appear for this query on top of Bing’s page and ChatGPT answers in a few months.
Edge browser is for Bing what Chrome is for Google. Yet, optimizing is different
To fully understand Bing SEO, you must know that Edge is a web browser developed by Microsoft, while Bing is a search engine operated by the same company. They have the same interdependence as Chrome with Google, but there are differences between the couples.
Starting in 2023, registered users can access the chat interface Microsoft introduced in Bing through Edge’s sidebar functionality without going to the Bing website. Any webpage can interact with the interface while it is running beside it.
In a demo, the AI assistant in Edge was shown to be able to sum up a 15-page document with only one click and even convert a code sample from Stack Overflow into a different programming language. Impressive? There’s even more to it than that!
Another advantage is having the “AI co-pilot” feature of the Edge browser to finish chores for you, like filling out forms and drafting emails. This sort of advantage attracts more and more users to use Bing, along with or instead of using Google’s products.
How does Bing SEO work?
The technique of increasing a website’s or web page’s visibility in search engine results, like those returned by Bing, is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Improved visitor quality and higher organic search engine ranks are two benefits of SEO for websites. Various phases are involved in achieving high ranks on Bing, including keyword research, content optimization for exact-match keywords, link development, and user engagement optimization.
The order in which websites appear in Bing’s search results is determined by a ranking algorithm, which is dynamic and ever-evolving. The quality and amount of the content, the relevance of the associated sites, and the level of user involvement all affect a website’s SEO score on Bing.
Suppose you conduct experiments on your website’s positions on Google vs. Bing. In that case, you’ll notice huge differences, depending on your industry but also the optimization degree of your website for Bing. It will make you wonder why it is so and what you have done wrong if you’re not in the rankings. But it’s just that your website is not fully optimized for Bing.
How to optimize your website using SEO for Bing
A few crucial steps must be taken to optimize your website for Bing SEO.
Do thorough keyword research for Bing
The first is thorough keyword research and finding the proper ones to help your project rank online. Research keywords to find the exact match keywords most likely to boost your Bing ranking to determine which suits your website. Your website’s titles, meta descriptions, and URLs should contain the main and related keywords.
When conducting the research, use Bing tools and search competitors as they rank on Bing. Don’t be distracted and search on Google – the results are entirely different.
Suppose the keyword is in all the right places in the title, meta description, heading, first paragraph, and of course, throughout the content in semantic context and with its various and related versions. In that case, you’re likelier to do better in Bing. If you don’t have those specific keywords in all those places, like skipping out the keywords in the heading tag or within the first few paragraphs, you won’t rank as well on Bing. Keyword placement is essential, compared to Google, where you must pay attention to other criteria more critical than On-page optimization.
We noticed that Google reached a certain level of ranking by the algorithm, and it doesn’t matter if you’re stuffing your page with the main keyword, secondary keywords and all the keyword variations. With Bing, this On-page SEO is crucial – it’s like optimizing for Google decades ago. So old-school SEO still works with Bing.
Create a good link-building strategy and focus on numbers, not only quality
Second, think of a good strategy to create links to your website and ensure they point to you from quality websites. You should also concentrate on producing content your readers find helpful and might share with others because Bing utilizes a ranking algorithm that considers user involvement, related pages, and other variables.
Compared to Google, Bing considers the number of links pointing toward your valuable content a strong signal. So, it’s not only about the value or the natural backlinking profile, as in Google SEO. If you are more used to create a good authority profile for Google, you might find it helpful to forget some of Google’s recommendations here. Numbers count for Bing, don’t forget that.
Create valuable content
In third place, just like Google, high-quality content is essential. You shouldn’t promote average-quality content just because it is easier that way. Bing is in the same situation as Google in that they don’t want to rank information that isn’t great since there is simply too much content to index. From this perspective, metadata is essential, but the content is king, even with Bing.
So before you write new content, it is recommended to check out some good content ideas. You don’t want just to copy what’s already popular; you want something new and fresh, but finding good content ideas can give you ideas of what is working and what is not.
Be active on social media – Bing ranks higher if performing well on social media accounts
The fourth tip when optimizing your website using SEO for Bing is to be active on social media. Unlike Google, social media is much more critical in Bing SEO.
Bing has publicly stated how it uses social signals to determine the ranking of various projects. So you need more social shares on Twitter, you need more social shares on Facebook, and you need to have visibility on LinkedIn. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and it also owns Bing – you get the idea. Also, let’s not forget that Microsoft was one of the first early investors on Facebook, so they are all connected. The higher the engagement on social media, the higher your chances for your project to rank better in Bing.
Finding the right content ideas that will go well or viral on social media is significant for Bing SEO. Also, the SEO master for Bing will always emphasize the importance of social media for ranking your project higher. Whenever we have a project that needs to be optimized for Bing, we always have the social media team by our side. That’s how critical social media is to Bing SEO.
Use Bing tools extensively: Bing Webmaster Tool is a must
Fifth, take advantage of Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Like Google has webmaster tools, Microsoft offers a free service called Bing Webmaster Tools that helps website owners and SEOs monitor and troubleshoot the website’s appearance in Bing’s search results. This will tell you errors, issues, anything wrong with your site, and what to fix. You must regularly explore and use this service to fix issues and rank on Bing.
Suppose your website’s designed in WordPress, one solution to improve your optimization and overall Bing SEO rating is to use the best WordPress hosting services for SEO Optimization. Here, the best option is WPEngine, but we also recommend other solutions to our clients.
Optimize your company for Bing Places
The sixth, but we think it’s more important than more of the other techniques, you should optimize your presence in Bing Places. Many companies have only focused on Google Maps, but Bing Places is another opportunity to rank well on Bing.
Search for your company’s brand on Bing. Are you present in Bing Places? If not, do this, and your chances to outrank your competitors increase drastically.
These six tips that we have just presented are the main steps you need to take for Bing SEO optimization.
Bing SEO – What are the benefits?
Bing offers numerous search options, including web, video, image, and map searches. All of these can help a business grow exponentially, and there are some advantages that even Google doesn’t offer.
Also, the searches on Bing will likely increase drastically after the ChatGPT hype and Microsoft’s brilliant move to integrate similar software into their search engine. Millions of users worldwide are registered to try the new Bing, which will increase constantly. Why not take advantage of this significant opportunity and try to rank higher on Bing?
We estimate that from only 6% of searches currently, Bing will reach up to 25-30% of worldwide searches by taking hundreds of millions of users from Google, And this only in the next couple of years.
Where this estimation comes from? Let’s see how Bing searches for TUYA Digital exploded in January after the ChatGPT AI chatbot hype began.
As you can see, January and February meant unprecedented growth for our searches from Edge, Bing’s browser. Precisely, searches from Edge increased five times. It is quite a performance, right? But we expect this to grow further as we optimize our presence in Bing.
From another perspective, all that poses a challenge to Bing SEO masters: as Bing integrates a chatbot similar to ChatGPT, this offers unprecedented dynamics. The new Bing integrates a chatbot provided by OpenAI, which is even more potent than the ChatGPT model. But we must admit it: as this is AI, this poses exponential dynamics to how we conduct SEO for Bing. We must adapt to AI deep-learning continuously and constantly check and improve Bing’s optimization while its AI integration is constantly deep learning and influencing the results.
When searching for the Best SEO agencies in Romania, one of the searches that place our agency on Google’s first page, the results on Bing look like this:
But, if you click on the Chat tab next to Search, the results look like this:
The AI chatbot Bing uses tells you that it took the results displayed from goodfirms.com, where that ranking appears, but it also lists some other ranking platforms that list the best SEO companies in Romania.
More than that, the way the new Bing looks, it’s likely to change users’ behaviour for good. Instead of relying on just the classical results displayed on a page of ten and browsing the second page afterward, users could quickly shift their search to the chat feature and get only the gist of their search, along with just a few results definitory for their search intention. After all, researching 2-3 pages to find the best result for you is long gone, and people rely on the first ten results. Even this behaviour will change, and people will start relying on the result offered by the ChatGPT integration.
So, understanding SEO for Bing is one step closer to Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO – optimizing not for classical search engines but for Generative Engines.
The “Prometheus model,” which Microsoft has developed, is a new method of interacting with OpenAI that improves the relevance of answers, annotates them, keeps them current, and does other things.
The new Bing includes a chatbot that behaves similarly to ChatGPT, allowing users to interact with Bing in a natural language.
With the option to follow up on prior inquiries and add more context to their search, Bing’s new ChatGPT-like function will go one step further by enabling users to converse with the search engine.
Anyone may test out the new Bing by going to Bing.com and running some sample searches on the spot while it is still in a limited preview on the desktop.
In a previous post, we presented ways to optimize your articles by using ChatGPT, which is pretty successful among our readers. It’s also in the first Google and Bing pages, which is quite contentful for our SEO team.
Another successful post we wrote on the subject is How to use ChatGPT for SEO in 8 steps. You might find some excellent tips on that, and you will learn how to use ChatGPT, one of the fundamental features of the new Bing, to optimize your projects. It’s about writing posts, keyword research, and all that.
Facts you need to consider when optimizing for Bing
A third of the US search market is controlled by Yahoo and Bing
The new Bing search market status was made public by the 2018 Comscore statistics on a global and national basis. As Bing powers Yahoo, we’ll generally treat their traffic as an essential component of the latter. Thus, Bing and Yahoo’s combined power secures around a third of the search market share in the US.
Even though Google’s traffic has reached 90% in some areas, there is a significant number and active users on a search engine that, shockingly, is not Google. Digital marketers must understand what they’re losing out on when they struggle to rank on the first Google pages, given the volume of search activity on Bing. In this approach, you’ll be able to optimize your website with the least amount of work feasible.
The majority of companies haven’t optimized for Bing – you have higher chances of outranking them if you start Bing SEO
Very few individuals are working on SEO for Bing, mainly because they already have excellent rankings on other search engines, such as Google. In reality, most websites simply optimize for Google, neglecting to optimize for other search engines. As a result, Bing has unintentionally developed a favourable search environment where brands can easily rank high, and there is little competition.
Furthermore, it’s challenging for newbies to compete with professionals who have exposed their talents for years, especially when you consider the almost two decades in which SEOs have solely concentrated their efforts on ranking highly on Google. But now, there is a new field where people can promote their brands and watch them flourish.
Bing is more transparent than Google about its ranking factors.
Although Bing provides users with recommendations for optimizing their websites, Bing clarifies that doing so won’t necessarily result in improved search engine ranks or increased traffic. However, crossing them off your list is still a good idea. This demonstrates that you should be prepared for the unexpected, but they are also willing to help you and, if required, be completely transparent.
Bing is significantly more open about ranking variables if you look at their case studies and Bing Webmaster Guidelines.
For Bing, On-Page SEO is more important than off-page SEO
On Bing, on-page SEO is fundamental. This is what controls the Bing landscape, with off-page coming in second. Despite the time, money, and effort that digital marketers put into both, it is well-known that successful off-page SEO only comes after solid on-page SEO.
Consequently, instead of picking the best option out of two, Bing pays on-site SEO its well-deserved respect.
Bing offers an improved multimedia user experience. Now it offers AI
Multimedia is better understood by Bing as an entity and is viewed as significantly adding value to text material. As a result, it is a ranking criterion for the Microsoft search engine, as indicated in their Bing Webmaster Guidelines.
Bing is more user-friendly regarding photos, which is another positive. In contrast to what Google users are used to, the search engine returns precise results without connected queries or suggestions of this nature.
You can therefore become Bing’s favourite if you offer neat, original, excellent, and pertinent photographs.
Bing offers a variety of free analysis tools.
As previously discussed in this article, Bing offers a service called Bing Webmaster Tools which provides valuable tools for optimizing your website.
Bing gives you the tools to register your website for examination, including checks on mobile-friendliness, backlinks, keywords, link profiles, and more. You can also get SEO reports highlighting any issues they detect when browsing your website.
In Bing SEO, backlinks quality matters less than backlinks number
The number of backlinks is so significant in Bing SEO that it can even beat the link quality. That is why Bing ranks better older, hence richer in links and social activity websites. Like Google, the Microsoft search engine favours natural connections from relevant, reliable websites that attest to the traffic they drive to your page and are older, as age symbolizes authority and confidence. You succeed if the backlinks have exact match anchor text (which includes your goal keywords).
Links demonstrate your credibility, popularity, and relevance to actual users, who will eventually drive organic traffic that is constantly growing.
Bing SEO can be the next big thing for companies trying to improve their visibility in search engine results. Bing is an attractive option for companies trying to advance their SEO because of its algorithm optimized for exact match keywords, emphasis on local results and user engagement, and analysis tools to assist you in understanding your SEO ranking and optimization efforts.
