By Michelle Bernachi, on 23 June 2022
When talking about SEO and search engines, inevitably our minds go to Google. It’s no surprise, considering the king of search engines occupies almost the entire market. However, it’s not the only one. Have you ever considered that positioning in Bing could also be a good way to increase your website's visibility?
In this article, we'll show you the features and benefits of Bing SEO, as well as give you some tips to acheive a good search engine positioning.
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Positioning in Bing?
Bing is currently Microsoft's search engine. In 2009, thanks to a partnership between the technology company and Yahoo!, by optimizing SEO on Bing’s search engine, you will also be doing it for Yahoo!.
Like all other search engines, Bing provides answers to users' questions in the form of organic results, ads, news, images, and videos.
What Kind of Search Engine Is Bing?
Bing is a hierarchical search engine, that is, it works through the so-called crawlers or spiders, which analyze existing websites on the Internet and then add them to its index and classify them by subject according to their relevance.
This type of operation is the most common in search engines. In fact, Google and Yahoo! work in the same way, although each has its own twists.
The Main Features of Bing
Now that you are familiar with this search engine, it’s important that you also know what differentiates it from other existing search engines:
- A well-positioned search engine: according to data from Statista, Bing ranks second in the world, just behind Google.
- Attractive design: Bing has a very user-friendly interface. On one hand, its cover image changes every day, offering users very striking photographs of animals, nature, or landscapes. In addition, by hovering over the image you can get information and interesting facts about it. On the other hand, the platform is very intuitive, as it’s very well structured and its searches are very visual compared to its competitors. However, this can lead to a slower loading time.
- Microsoft Office at the click of a button: its homepage allows direct access to all the services of the Microsoft Office package, such as Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Word, and more, which can greatly speed up your activities and projects.
- A secure search engine: Bing also offers extensive security options for you to adapt to your needs. For example, if there are minors at home, you can choose the safe and strict search option so that adult content is not displayed in the results.
- Search options: when making a query, Bing allows you to apply different filters, such as language and date. Specifically, when searching for videos, you can select their duration, resolution, or date of publication.
- Possibility of generating collections: Bing offers you the save the most interesting results and access them easily through the "My Saved Items" section.
- Great importance to social networks: Although the positioning in Bing is very similar to Google, one of its main differences is that it takes into account social networks for the organic positioning of websites. Therefore, when content is shared on social networks a lot, it increases its chances of achieving a good positioning in Bing.
What Are the Benefits of Using Bing?
As you have already seen, Bing is the second most-used search engine in the world. Therefore, it’s a search engine that provides you with a considerable amount of traffic. In addition to this aspect, positioning in Bing also presents another series of benefits:
- Web positioning in Yahoo!: thanks to the alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo!, by improving your positioning in Bing you will also be doing the same in Yahoo!, so you can be more visible in the fourth largest search engine in the world.
- Less competition: you can find great opportunities for your business within your sector in Bing since it’s not as big as Google.
- Permissive to over-optimization: Bing is not as strict as Google with over-optimized websites. Therefore, if your content is good, you can achieve a very good ranking.
- A great tool for the US market: this search engine is mostly used in the United States, exceeding 30% of the market share. Positioning in Bing can give you great visibility.
- Cheaper ads: thanks to the fact that there is less competition compared to Google, advertising on Bing is cheaper, something that can come in handy for small businesses or brands that have just come to light.
5 Tips for Positioning on Bing
Like any search engine, Bing pays attention to a number of specific elements to rank websites. It may coincide with other search engines in some aspects, but not in others, it presents its own unique characteristics. Here are 5 tips that can help you climb the ranks in this search engine:
1. Pay Attention to Keywords
Bing takes into account the exact match of words when offering search results. Therefore, it will try to offer websites with titles that are as similar as possible to the phrase that the user has entered in the search engine. This is a stark contrast to Google's methodology, which is more context-driven and less about delivering exact results.
Therefore, when implementing your positioning in Bing, it is very important to use exact match keywords to obtain better results.
2. Take Care of Your Content
No matter which search engine you want to rank in, they all value content above anything else. Good content is what will make people more interested in your page and make them visit it more, causing you to be ranked higher. However, Bing values more updated content. This means that pages that regularly add new content or update already published content will benefit from Bing.
3. Improve the User Experience
Offering the public a responsive website that offers a good user experience will be one of the keys to positioning in Bing because it will make more people click on your website. Elements like reducing your page load times or creating attractive meta descriptions are some ways to increase the CTR organically.
4. Make Your Website Have Authority
Bing prefers to place websites in the top positions that it considers "authoritative". According to the search engine, for a website to be considered as such, it must have many backlinks. Backlinks are links placed on a web page that point to another website. If someone links to your website on their page, you have a backlink. If you are the one who creates the link on your website, that website will have a backlink from you. If your website is new, it will be more difficult to get backlinks from other sites, but it’s not impossible. Creating useful and contrasted content will help you get them.
5. Get Your Content Shared on Networks
As we have already mentioned, to improve your positioning in Bing, sharing on social media will be highly valued, because, it’s a sign that this content has popularity among users. Therefore, if your content is shared on networks such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, it will improve your web positioning in the search engine.
Free Tools to Improve SEO Positioning in Bing
Following the above tips will help you to improve your positioning in Bing. There are also several free tools that will boost your SEO possibilities even more. Here are the 5 that we consider most useful:
- WordPress add-on to submit URL: this tool will automatically submit your WordPress website URL to the Bing search index. If you are starting your positioning in this search engine, it will help you greatly.
- Mobile compatibility test: almost all search engines (Bing included) take into account the adaptability of a website to mobile devices. Therefore, Bing offers you a tool with which you can analyze whether your website meets this requirement. This way you will be able to know if you need to optimize your page in that sense or if it’s already ready.
- Keyword search tool: as we have already seen, keywords play a very important role in all search engines, but especially in Bing ranking, where accuracy is very important. In order for you to find the right keywords, the search engine also offers a free platform for you to find relevant terms for your websites and articles.
- Web performance analysis: this tool is very interesting, as you will not only be able to improve your positioning in Bing, but also in other search engines. Thanks to it, you can perform a kind of audit of your website to see if there are technical problems and be able to solve them.
- SEO reports: if you want to know if your SEO positioning efforts are paying off, this tool will give you the answer. It will specify where you need to improve in order to get a higher ranking.
