SEO for Bing (and Yahoo): a short guide

When we talk about SEO, we don't talk a lot about Bing as we spend a lot of time worrying about Google and making sure we optimize our websites for its algorithms. (For the purposes of this article, Bing also refers to Yahoo as Yahoo is also powered by Bing, so it works very similarly)

 

We tend to focus our efforts on Google instead of Bing for 2 reasons:

 

·         Google dominates the panorama of search engines with the 88% of the global market share, which means that most of our customer traffic comes from Google.

·         Google is the most advanced of all search engines, which means that generally if you are well optimized for Google, you are probably also optimized for Bing.

 

So does this mean we should completely ignore SEO for Bing?

 

This largely depends on your situation, but we also need to be aware that Google and Bing use different positioning criteria that could make a difference.

 

Do I have to optimize for Bing (and Yahoo)?

 

You need to optimize for Bing if:

 

·         Your site operates in the United States. In the U.S., Bing (and Yahoo) hold a 36% market share , which means that over a third of all visitors who come to your site are from Bing or Yahoo. Bing also has a significant presence in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Hong Kong, France and Norway

·         If you receive significant amounts of traffic from Bing and Yahoo (just check on Google Analytics in "All traffic", then "Source / Medium").

·         Your target audience tends to be "older". Older users tend to use Bing more than younger users.

Related Post: Google crawl budget: what it is and how to manage it for SEO

 

If your site meets one of these criteria, you will probably have to think at least a little bit about Bing and optimize your site for this search engine.

 

How to optimize for Bing (and Yahoo)

 

Below, we list the main points where Bing and Google differ in order to customize their SEO NYC strategy and optimize for Bing.

 

·         Social media - Google doesn't use social media signals in its rankings while Bing does, which means that a strong social media strategy can help improve your rankings on Bing.

·         Non-textual content - Bing seems to be better equipped to understand non-textual content such as images, videos, audio and even flashes, increasing the chances of rewarding such content if it is of high quality. However, we recommend caution because although Bing can better understand multimedia content, the creation of this type of content could damage positioning on Google, therefore we recommend a measured approach to the media.

·         Local - in local search, Bing puts more emphasis on proximity, while Google puts more emphasis on the brand. Therefore, small businesses are more likely to gain visibility in Bing's local search than Google. This makes a strategy focused on Bing potentially more important for smaller brands with a local presence; claiming and updating the profile of your places Bing is a good starting point.

·         Keywords - Bing rewards exact match keywords more than Google, which is better at determining the sentiment behind the use of keywords. This means that if you want to improve your rankings in Bing, you need to make sure that the metadata, page content and meta keywords use precise, relevant and high-search keywords.

·         Meta Keywords - Google hasn't used the Meta keywords tag for years, while Bing still uses it so it's worth updating it with relevant keywords if the traffic from Bing is significant.

·         Canonical Tags - Bing finds it more difficult to determine the canonical version of a page than Google, making the use of canonical tags more important.

·         Links - Bing places more emphasis on links from highly reliable domains, especially if those domains have .gov, .edu or .org extensions. Receiving links from these types of sites will give you a greater advantage over Bing.

·         Crawling - Bing tends to crawl pages less frequently and tends to focus on a smaller and more important set of pages, which means that submitting pages to Bing's Webmaster tools can be an important strategy for getting new indexed content and place it more quickly.

Related Post: Ranking websites on Google: SEO positioning factors