Why—and How—You Should Optimize Your Website for Bing

When we talk about SEO, it almost goes without saying that we’re talking about Google. Given this, you may have looked at the headline of this article and thought something along the lines of: “SEO for Bing? Should I also do SEO for AltaVista and Lycos while I’m at it?” There is a compelling case to pay attention to rankings in Microsoft's Bing, though. Even better, optimizing for Bing takes very little effort, so there’s really no downside to it. Here’s why every business should incorporate Bing into their SEO plan. Less competition Because most businesses are laser-focused on Google, your efforts are more likely to pay off with Bing. You might not be able to rank at the top of the SERPs on Google, but that could very well be an achievable goal with Bing. A bigger market share than you think Does ranking highly on Bing really matter since Google is such a behemoth? It absolutely does. In 2020, Bing had nearly a 12% market share on desktop searches and almost 16% on tablets in the United States. Once you add mobile devices into the mix, the overall market share in the U.S. dips to just over 6%. However, when you consider the trillions of searches performed each year, this can still mean a lot of traffic to your website if you’re ranking high on Bing. Transparency One common complaint that many of us in the SEO industry have about Google is its lack of transparency about ranking factors. Bing is much more open about how they rank websites, which makes it easier to perform well with them. Bing and Google have a lot of overlap The best practices for Google and Bing overlap quite nicely, especially the emphasis on high quality content. Take the time to put out well-written, informative content on your website and you will be rewarded by both search engines. Bing powers Amazon Echo’s voice search Amazon Echo’s Alexa has brought voice search to the mainstream—and it’s powered by Bing. Nearly 30% of internet users also use a smart speaker and, of those smart speaker users, nearly 70% use Amazon Echo. How to optimize your website for Bing While the Venn diagram of SEO for Bing vs. Google is essentially a circle, there is a tiny sliver where they don’t overlap. Bing places a heavier weight on backlinks than Google does, particularly those from social media. This means optimizing your social media presence boosts your website in the eyes of Bing. Bing also looks more at on-page SEO than Google does—and they especially favor keywords that are exact matches for what people are searching. While I don’t recommend shoe-horning a bunch of awkward-sounding long tail keywords into all of your blog posts, if you can incorporate some important exact keywords into your content, meta description and headers, this will help you. It’s also important to set your website up with Bing. Get a webmaster tools account if you don’t have one, verify your website and check your schema markup with Bing Markup Validator. Claim your business on Bing Places, then create and maintain your listing there, which is critical for local SEO ranking and all those Alexa voice searches for local businesses. Make sure your website also has your location displayed prominently, as this can also improve your rankings for local search.