There’s no denying that Google is the top dog when it comes to search engines, but a little engine called Bing isn’t so far behind.
This means if Bing SEO isn’t part of your strategy, you’re missing out on some serious search market share.
In this article, I’ll break down Bing SEO vs. Google SEO.
What You’ll Learn:
When you think of SEO, the first thing that probably comes to mind is Google and its coveted ranking. It might surprise you to learn that Bing is also important for online marketing and can help boost your sales. In order to have a solid SEO strategy, you’ll need to take both into account.
If the thought of learning how to optimize your search results ranking on a whole new platform seems like it’s not worth your time, it is.
Why Bing SEO Is Important
Google may be king but Bing shouldn’t be ignored. As of December 2022, Bing held 8.23% of the market share for search. While that’s still significantly less than Google, it is also significantly higher than Yahoo, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo.
It also means that there are millions of users on Bing that you could be missing out on if you’re too focused on Google. By making small tweaks to your content to rank higher on Bing, you could be gaining exposure to whole new audiences.
Did I say millions? I meant billions. That’s right. As of February 2023, Bing was surpassing 3 billion users a month. It was also bringing in an estimated $11.59 million a year in ad revenue.
Bing is also getting into the AI chatbot game. After the release of Bing Chat, integration with the popular ChatGPT, the search engine started seeing over 100 million users a day. Within 48 hours of the announcement of the launch of Bing Chat, over 1 million people joined the waitlist. How’s that for the search engine everyone forgot about?
Fortunately, you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel to optimize for Bing, but there are some factors and potential changes you need to consider.
While there are some similarities between Bing and Google, there are also some significant differences that should be considered when optimizing your website.
Let’s take a look at what you need to do to secure a better Bing ranking. Keep in mind, we are talking about organic search engine rankings here, not pay-per-click.
Why Bother with Bing SEO?
In addition to Bing’s growing market share, there are a number of reasons that optimizing your site for this search engine is a good idea. Let’s take a look at the three biggest reasons.
1. There’s Less Competition – Want to get more eyes on your content? Move to where there is less competition! With Bing, you’ll still get a decent amount of traffic but without fighting through all of the competition on Google. Even though Bing only has 8% of the market share of search users, that’s still millions of people that you could better position yourself to get in front of.
2. Certain Demographics Use Bing More – If there are certain demographics that you really want to target, Bing might be the answer. Certain parts of the country, like the Great Plains, Rust Belt, and Southern States, are more likely to use Bing over Google. In addition, more politically conservative households are using Bing. If you’re trying to reach these demographics, try your hand at Bing.
3. Bing Won’t Keep You Guessing – One of the reasons why Google’s SEO is so hard to master is that Google is constantly changing its algorithms. What worked for you last year is probably not going to work this year. Bing, on the other hand, wants to give companies reasons to use their platform. Therefore, they’re making it more user-friendly by keeping their algorithm steady.
Bing SEO vs Google SEO? How Are They Different?
Alright, let’s get down to the differences that you came here for. To begin, take a look at the key ranking factors found to be most important by a recent SearchMetrics analysis.
- Top brands tend to have a higher Bing ranking, just as they do on Google.
- Social signals correlate very closely with higher rankings.
- User engagement is a big factor.
- Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings as well (though they carry less weight on Bing than Google).
- Page Authority is important.
- Relevant and quality content is important for search rankings.
- On-page technical factors also play an important role.
- Bing is more visually appealing, with larger photos, graphics, and videos in the search results
- Partnership with LinkedIn to provide more relevant targeting
- Bing features integrations with Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, Tripadvisor, Zillow, and more
Here’s a closer look at these Bing ranking factors, as well as some others that you should take into account when optimizing for Bing.
Brand Preferences and Website Type
First up in this guide is what types of websites the platform favors. Knowing this key piece of information can help you learn how to rank.
When it comes to performing well on Bing, the search engine’s algorithm is looking for things like quality, credibility, user engagement, page load time, location, and relevance. It also puts a lot of stock in a site’s sitemap, backlinks, and redirects.
In addition, Bing’s algorithm is dynamic, meaning that if the search engine detects that a certain ranking criterion seems to be more important than another, it will start to assign more weight to that specific criterion.
Bing also prefers content that is properly cited and relevant. If they’re going to push your content to their users, they want it to be credible. They also want your content to be easily accessible to the reader. This means if you’re forcing readers to scroll through pages of content before they can find the answer they’re looking for, Bing isn’t going to like it.
The search engine also doesn’t like negative content, such as profanity-laden content or name-calling. If you’re trying to make a point, do it without the extra language.
Basically, keep your content relevant, user-friendly, and accurate to find success on Bing.
Bing SEO: User Engagement by CTR
User engagement should be a primary focus of any marketing strategy, period.
But when optimizing for Bing specifically, it’s important to know that engagement is a pretty critical factor for the search engine.
One way you can measure user engagement is through click-through rates (CTRs). To calculate your CTR, use this formula: clicks/impressions = CTR.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) Formula
Essentially, the more people you can get on your page, the better.
That means being strategic with your headlines and meta descriptions. They should be interesting enough to gain a click and appeal directly to the problem or question the piece of content addresses.
It also means the strategic placement of keywords, and incorporating them in a way that seems natural.
Bing also suggests keeping Monthly and Yearly Traffic, New Versus Returning Visitors, Channel Share, Average Time on Page, and Conversion Rate in mind when considering your user engagement.
Bing SEO: Social Signals
When looking closely at Bing SEO vs Google, you’ll notice that Bing has a unique social feature that its main opponent doesn’t have.
When Google tends to treat social media sites like any other website, Bing puts a lot of stock into these social platforms. In the world of Bing, your social sites are another way to boost your ranking, specifically with their partner, LinkedIn. This could be because Bing is newer and trying to gain traction or it could be because Bing is integrated with so many other Microsoft products, like Xbox and Microsoft Office.
Well-positioned results tend to have a higher number of shares, likes, comments, and retweets. Specific URLs stand out in top results that have a high mass of social signals.
When a user searches on Bing, they can immediately see if a Facebook friend or Twitter follower has recommended or rated the company or product mentioned in the search.
They can even find related Pinterest boards when searching for specific images.
Google hasn’t yet been able to integrate social media into their search results like Bing has.
Facebook has a new Recommendation feature that allows users to ask their friends for local recommendations in a simple status.
If a user’s Facebook friends have previously recommended your company, service, or product on the social media platform, the Bing search results will reflect that. Ultimately, this is like a new way to spread word-of-mouth through online search methods.
As a useful SEO tool, these social media recommendations act somewhat as reviews and boast your Bing ranking. This is a key Bing ranking factor that is exclusive to Bing. Google hasn’t been able to latch onto this feature just yet.
This is just another reason why social media should be a component of your overall marketing and strategy.
Bing vs Google SEO: Backlinks
While Bing tends to put less emphasis on backlinks than Google, backlinks are still important to Bing SEO ranking.
Sites with more backlinks seem to rank higher with Bing, just as they do with Google. However, the quality of those backlinks is increasingly more important than the quantity.
Bing even offers a helpful link explorer tool, the Site Explorer, to better understand the value of the links on any given page.
Bing Site Explorer
With that said Bing is still a few steps behind Google with regard to how elaborately they evaluate these link features.
Instead of seeking to index every piece of content available on a domain, as Google does, Bing actively removes pages from their index if they are found to not have enough link authority or value to rank on their search results.
What this usually means is that in order for a page to maintain a place in Bing’s index, it must have at least one external website link to it. This critical Bing ranking factor can hurt your company’s ranking if ignored.
Some backlinks that you should be interested in are:
- Editorial Backlinks: when other sites mention your site
- Guest Blogging backlinks
- Business Profiles
- Guest Posts
- Sponsored Links
There are more types of backlinks but these are the most popular types to get.
Bing SEO vs Google SEO: Page Authority
Another big difference between Bing and Google SEO is page authority. While it’s important across the board, Bing tends to put more emphasis on Page Authority than Google.
Bing wants to know that if they are referring users to your site, your site can be trusted.
When determining page authority, the search engines look at the length of the site’s existence, the number of backlinks from other sites, and other things that demonstrate how trustworthy and respected your site is.
That’s not exactly good news for brand-new sites, and they will have a harder time ranking in Bing.
Content and Location
Relevant and quality content correlates strongly with good Bing SEO ranking, just as it does with Google.
Like Google, you’ll want to focus on long-form pieces (1,500+) words and include 5-7 related keywords in the content. As always, write your content for your reader – not the search engine.
Bing also seems to be more likely to reward pictures, videos, and audio due to what is known as “entity understanding”, while Google relies much more on text-based content.
Bing is also better equipped to interpret sites that use Flash, which is all but invisible to Google.
This means that having a more dynamic website that incorporates high-quality content with original media may help to better position your site for high rankings on both search engines.
When it comes to local searches, Bing also tends to showcase small businesses, assuming the searcher wants the most proximal results.
Whereas, Google tends to sway in favor of larger, more established companies, giving preference to what it sees as the most credible results.
For local businesses, this aspect should be an important consideration for optimal SEO.
Bing vs Google SEO: Technical Factors
As you might expect, on-page technical factors and behind-the-scenes structure for a website play an important role in higher Bing ranking, just as they do with Google. However, SEO for Bing vs Google in this instance is vastly different.
Everything from the site speed of a URL to the position of keywords in the title can be factored into the ranking of a site.
Bing has a strong correlation with homepages outranking internal pages in results to a lesser degree than Google.
And while Google has evolved to be much more intuitive when it comes to the context of a page, Bing is still much more straightforward, relying upon keywords in page titles, meta tags, and specific keywords. This can make optimizing your website a bit easier than Google.
In the early days of Google, Googlebot only crawled the first 100k of a given page, though as the crawler has matured, the page size is less of an issue.
Bing, on the other hand, still only caches roughly the first 100k of web pages, which means that it is critical to place the most important elements of your content within that first 100k or it won’t help boost your results.
As your website grows, it can become increasingly difficult to ensure that web pages are not duplicated.
If two pages are duplicated or are too similar to be differentiated by the search engine, you will need to program a canonical URL. This means that you will choose which page gets all the attention on search engines.
Google is good at determining a site’s canonical URL even if it is not coded properly to return the Canonical URL. Bing didn’t in the past, but now it does support the Canonical tag. However, they still have some issues with it.
While you can sometimes use redirects to display the canonical URL, this move can sometimes end up breaking your links. This can devastate your outcomes.
While Google prefers a 301 (permanent URL) redirect, a 302 (temporary redirect) will not usually cause any major issues with indexing.
Bing, on the other hand, will interpret a 302 as a 301, after they crawl it a few times.
For that reason, most people use 301.
301 Redirects vs 302 Redirects
Bing and Google also handle Meta Refreshes differently, a factor that should be taken into consideration.
Meta Refresh is when a web browser is instructed to automatically refresh a webpage after a specific amount of time.
It is also possible to program the browser to display a different URL after the webpage has been refreshed.
Google will follow a zero-second Meta Refresh and treat it like a 301, while Bing will not.
Meta Refresh will actually terminate the Bing crawler from accessing any more of the website. Bing is working on this, and it may be changing soon. As for now, however, it may hurt your Bing ranking.
Another issue with the Meta Refresh function is that is can impair the browser’s “back” button, which may be annoying to some users.
Webmaster Tools
Just like Google, Bing offers a large variety of webmaster tools. Within your dashboard, you can find things that will help you with SEO, reporting, diagnostic issues, and communication.
SEO features include things like backlinks, keyword research, a site scan, and SEO reporting. When you use these tools, you are more likely to rank higher on Bing.
Another really cool tool that Bing offers is their Mobile Friendliness Tool. This tool will tell you everything you need to know about how to make your site as mobile-friendly as possible.
Not only can you use these tools to improve your ranking but the insight you can gain from them will also help you create better content for your readers.
Wrapping Up
While there are many similarities in the ranking factors considered by Bing and Google, it’s clear that there are enough differences in SEO tools and tactics to warrant making necessary adjustments to ensure that your site ranks well on both.
Not only will you potentially reach a wider audience and beat your competitors to the punch, you’ll also rank well on both Yahoo and Bing. Don’t forget that Bing powers Yahoo search.
And while taking all of these technical components and Bing ranking factors for the different search engines into account is important, remember to be sure that, first and foremost, you optimize your site for the visitor.
Having a great, user-friendly website that people will use and return to is what will make all of the other Bing SEO work worthwhile.
What has your experience been? Have you noticed differences in your ranking on Bing versus Google? Let us know in the comment section below!
