A Beginner’s Guide to Bing SEO
What is Bing?
In simplest words, Bing is a search engine owned and launched by Microsoft and revealed by Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, in May 2009. It was launched to take over MSN Search and Windows Live Search, later known as Live Search. The search engine became fully functional in June 2009. Later that year in July, Bing and Yahoo! struck a deal and confirmed that Bing will power Yahoo searches.
Bing in terms of searches provides different services that include images, videos, web and map search. Bing at present managed to generate over 12 billion searches worldwide and most of them were from the USA. It has 2.83% of the search engine market share worldwide.
Role of Bing in SEO Ranking
Search Engines are a part of our daily life routine now. We have established that we need the internet searches in our life to find data, analytics, content or what so ever relevant to our search query. When it comes to search engine marketing, Google search tops the list for all the obvious reasons. It is more popular among people around the world, it is reliable and it has more reach. 92% of the world is using Google for its web searches. However, sometimes putting secondary search engines in your marketing strategy turns out to be more beneficial.
Bing is not as popular as google but still has much to offer for SEO marketers. The biggest advantage that comes with the second best is that there is much lesser competition and you can rank better in SERPS with no trouble. Everyone is using Google for search engine marketing leaving Bing with more chances to give your business a better reach and visibility on SERPs.
5 Important Steps Your Need to Take to Rank Better on Bing
Search engine optimization is no game. Bing or Google, all the search engines use certain strategies to enhance website visibility and ranking. Bing has different criteria than google and others that stand it apart and make it efficient for rankings. It is more open about its ranking factors than google ever has been. It has a lower bouncing rate for traffic that we attract to our web pages and the audience on Bing has higher quality.
Regardless of its merits and demerits, it is important to follow certain strategies to improve website ranking on Bing.
01- Use Exact Keyword in H1 and H2 Title Tags
On Bing, it is important to be as relevant and specific to the subject matter while using keywords in heading tags as much as possible. Unlike other search engines, Bing does not seek the context of the terms used in web content. It increases ranking based on the relevancy of keywords that are used in H1 and H2 tags. Be precise and use keywords that fall in your business category.
Other than adding relevant keywords to headings and tags, you should write keywords in your meta description as well to have better click-through rates.
02- Focus on High-Quality Content
Bing bases its ranking on high-quality content and that makes it very helpful for its users. Good web content does not need to be stuffed with unnecessary keywords in order to increase its relevance. A well-written content targets the needs of its audience presents that data in a form that is easily consumable for everyone and always takes credibility for it so Bing can deem it as a trustworthy source.
To give web content credibility, Bing has some ground rules that every web content should follow. Every content producer that is writing a blog or any type of content should always mention authors. The page itself should not be overloaded with ads and ads that it runs should not be popping up before presenting the actual content.
03- Social Media Marketing is Important
Bing algorithms for better ranking also consider social media presence. If a certain business has a pleasant influence, it is popular among its audience, and everyone is sharing it with others, it is definitely going to rank better with Bing. With Bing, social media marketing matters so your search engine marketing game is actually dependent on your social media marketing as well. The more engagement and reach your business has on social media, the better visibility it will have on Bing SERPs.
Having more reach on social media does not have to depend on fake followers. Bing does not support spams and unconventional followers gaining techniques. Build your brand and be popular among your audience and Bing will automatically increase your organic rankings.
04- Use Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing webmaster tools is a great feature that helps you with finding relevant keywords, backlinks and many other important insights. It is a free service that Bing offers for its users to check their website performance and provides valuable insights that help webmasters to enhance their SERP rankings.
To access webmaster tools, a business simply has to enlist its website in Bing Index Crawler.
05- Use Schema Markup for your Website
Schema Markup is a code that web pages have to apply in order for search engines to pick valuable data from their websites and generate rich information in search results. In other terms, it enhances snippets that it shows under the title of web content. To give your web content a unique look and to provide maximum information about your content or business in search results, using schema markup on Bing is mandatory.
Content publishers can use annotations for images or any type of content that they are including in their blog posts so that Bing crawlers can pick up important descriptions of the data to produce more information-rich search results. It helps Bing understand your content and its types and it makes your search result more visually appealing.
Conclusion
Bing is a search engine that has much more potential than what people consider. It is more efficient in improving your search rankings. People tend to overlook the importance of using Bing for search engine marketing but those who are using it are actually benefiting quite alright with lesser competition. If you want your business to have better reach and results in the ranking, try Bing and the above-discussed strategies to improve its visibility and let people know what your business is all about on top of SERPs!
