Search engine optimization with Bing SEO

As a website operator, you want your site to be easily found. You often think of Google, but not the search engine Bing, right? For many website operators, search engine optimization is an abstract topic, and Bing SEO is one of the areas that quickly fades into the background. This is probably because Germany is a Google country. According to Statcounter, Google had a 94.5% share in Germany in 2019, whereas Bing only had 3%.

[caption id="attachment_25213" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

Fig. 1 Statcounter statistics on search engine usage in Germany in 2019[/caption]

What features does Bing offer?

With Bing's preview function, which was previously unknown in search engines, users receive useful information about content and internal links before even entering the website. The displayed content is actually drawn from the page's content, and not from a meta-description, like with the snippet.

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Fig. 1: Statcounter statistics on search engine usage in Germany in 2019[/caption]

Nevertheless, you should not overlook the search engine Bing. Users who come through Bing often have better user behavior than those from Google. They tend to view more pages, stay longer on the domain, and have a higher conversion rate. So, it can indeed benefit you as a provider to target this audience. Additionally, the results of Apple’s Siri service and Amazon’s Alexa are based on Bing.

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Fig. 2: Comparing user behavior on Bing with Google[/caption]

Similarities between Bing and Google

As a rule, you are already optimizing your website for Bing if you carry out search engine optimization following Google's guidelines. This is partly because Bing uses similar criteria and partly because some SEO standards were jointly developed in an alliance that includes Bing, Google, and other search engines. An example of this is the structured data from schema.org.

Further Assistance for Bing Search Engine Optimization

It's also very helpful to take a look at Bing's search results page. Bing specifies much more precisely where the data comes from. Besides pure search engine optimization, revising other profiles on the internet like Xing, Wikipedia, etc., can lead to better visibility on Bing. Optimizing multimedia elements on the website can also show better effects than on Google. This is visible in the Bing image search or the video results. By strategically using structured data and consistently using alt titles, you can effectively place images and videos in the search engine.

Furthermore, Bing search offers several features not available in Google. For example, individual elements in images can be selected for searching. Videos are complemented with a lot of information in the results, such as whether they are trailers. Additionally, videos can already be viewed in the preview, and Bing takes search query history into account to provide the most relevant results.

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Fig. 3: Identification of elements in Bing image search[/caption]

What you should pay attention to

Microsoft offers various guidelines and tools for its search engine to support users in achieving the best search engine optimization. From our perspective, the following three are the most relevant:

Bing Webmaster Tools

• Submit sitemap.xml

• Block URLs

• Review reports

• Manage crawls

• Test mobile-friendliness

We highly recommend using the Bing Webmaster Tools to gain better control. Naturally, the domain can also rank on the Bing search engine even if it is not registered there. However, it's interesting to see how Bing assesses the website compared to Google.

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Bing offers very informative Bing Webmaster Guidelines on their website. These provide users with initial assistance on the topic of search engine optimization. The instructions are thematically divided and clearly presented. The guidelines are helpful for both experienced users and those new to Bing SEO who want to know what the search engine operator values.

Markup Validator

If you use structured data on your website, you can verify its correct implementation with the Bing Markup Validator. Supported formats are:

• HTML Microdata

• Microformats

• RDFa

• schema.org

• OpenGraph by Facebook

Please note that you must register for Bing Webmaster Tools to use the tool. The same applies to the SEO Analyzer and the keyword research tool.

Special Features of the Bing Search Engine

In general, we’d like to offer you three pieces of advice that will help with Bing SEO:

1. Exact Match URLs:

Bing places much more importance on the correct name in the domain than Google. So if you have a domain that contains your brand name, it will automatically rank better with Bing.

2. JavaScript

Currently, Bing is not as advanced as Google in interpreting JavaScript on websites (as of 10.2019). This means your site may rank well on Google and be less well-placed on Bing. Especially websites that dynamically load content via JavaScript are affected. If your website uses little JavaScript or does not load content dynamically, you can ignore this point.

3. Adaptations by Google

Google frequently makes changes to its SEO requirements, suddenly giving certain features more or less weight. The last known change was removing "noindex" from the robots.txt file. It should be noted that these changes apply only to Google and not automatically to Bing. So don’t get nervous.

Conclusion

The Bing search engine offers many individual features that set it apart from its major rival Google. Simultaneously, its users consistently demonstrate better behavior on websites, regardless of the industry. To achieve a good ranking here, you need to make only a few individual adjustments, but you can use good tools from Bing to closely monitor your developments.

How can we assist you?

Do you want to increase your conversions and sales through organic search? Are you already ranking well on Google and now want to succeed with Bing? We support you in Bing SEO and thus achieve higher rankings in the Bing search engine.

Contact us here, we look forward to your inquiry!