Beginners Guide to Bing SEO

SEO is a long process, we already know that, but when it comes to optimizing your SEO for the best performance, Google is probably the first thing you think of, right? That’s not a bad thing, Google is the most popular search engine and it makes sense to focus your efforts on the biggest player, but are you missing out?

As marketers, we’re always looking for an ‘in’, and when most of your competition is fighting over the biggest player, going after the next biggest player instead and making your mark there could prove a very lucrative option for you.

Why Consider Bing?

Did you know that Yahoo search is powered by Bing? It’s estimated that Bing (and Yahoo) control around 21% of the US search marker, almost a quarter of all searches. It’s also a little-known fact that ranking on Bing is usually a precursor to ranking on Google: if your blog post is number 1 on Bing, there’s a good chance it’s not that far behind on Google either.

If you are running an affiliate blog website or an authority site that hosts affiliate linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., there is some scant evidence to suggest that Bing SEO optimization could send through higher-quality traffic to your website. The traffic may not be huge, but if the conversion rateA conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take a desired action on your site. is good then it may be the boost you need, especially if the bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website. is lower than it would usually be with Google.

How to optimize for Bing

Just like ranking with Google, Bing website optimization involves many factors, from on-page techniques like keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. analysis to off-page techniques like building a backlinking profile. Although the Bing ranking algorithm and Google ARE different, most of the Bing SEO tips we’ll discuss specifically for Bing will only help your ranking on Google too, so there’s no need to be worried about leaving Google out.

Building Backlinks

There’s evidence to suggest that Bing likes backlinks, but it likes them in a different way to Google. Let us explain.

Results show that Bing likes websites to have backlinks to prove its authority, just like Google does, but where this differs is that Bing seems to prefer websites that have quality backlinks from specific sources, especially containing the keyword in the anchor textAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to..

Bing is more focused on quality as it prefers your links to come from do-follow sources that use an exact match or at least your keyword in the anchor text, whereas Google is less fussy and just likes to see quality backlinks.

Both Bing and Google will favor backlinks from higher domain rank and authority websites. This means that if you can get backlinks from leaders in your field, or from authority websites like a .gov one, your results will reflect this.

Appearance and UX

Is your website easy to use? If so, that’s good, as it’s winning you brownie points with your users, with Google, as well as with Bing. Now, is your website attractive? That’s a more difficult question and one that Bing wants you to answer with a resounding YES.

Bing has put a lot of focus in recent years on websites being aesthetically pleasing but highly functional for the user. While Google has shied away from caring too much about what the website looks like as long as it’s easy to use, Bing wants the content to be engaging and multimedia-rich.

You can improve the formatting of your content quite easily by adding the appropriate tags to your text (bold, H1, H2, etc.) and by using relevant images in your content. Here’s the catch, though: not just “any” image will go. Google has become very clever over the last few years and is able to tell if you’re using lots of stock images (this is even worse if it’s free ones from the likes of Pexels and Pixabay). While Bing doesn’t mind so much, as long as you have some unique images, Google would prefer it if you used bespoke images that you owned all the rights to.

What to do? The easiest option is to go out and take your own photos as much as possible. Blog article photos don’t have to be the world’s most amazing photography, but the more images you can get that are individual to your site, the better your ranking will be on both Bing and Google.

There’s no set ratio for images, but generally, at least once every 500 words is about right, and don’t forget to fill the description and the alt tags too as this will definitely improve your SEO analyzer with Bing.

Social Media

Let’s just get this out there: Social media is a vital Bing search ranking tool. Bing LOVES social media. In fact, Bing loves social media so much that it ranks social referral traffic as the second most important factor alongside backlinks.

That’s important, right?!

Social media traffic can be very fickle, but the best way to build your traffic is to use ads, or, if you’re not ready to jump in and spend a fortune on ads, get involved in some of the groups in your niche and share your content.

Sharing content from a niche group is a great way to send a flood of interested traffic to your website, demonstrating to Bing that you have good and useful content that is loved by social media. With any luck, this will boost your traffic so that Google also recognizes the users that land on your pages and stay there.

Just be sure to be HELPFUL in the group and don’t constantly spam with links to your website.

Summing Up

Whether you’re looking at how to rank on Bing, Google, or even DuckDuckGo, the most common theme is the need to create good content.

Our audiences are getting smarter every day and the search engine algorithms are quickly catching up. Audiences want to be given good information in a way that they can access it easily and digest it easily, too. They don’t want to have to scroll right to the bottom of a long sales page only to find the same content that everyone else is sharing.

Our advice: go forth and create excellent, multimedia-rich, engaging, and informative content and Bing will love you. As an added bonus, so will Google!