Bing vs. Google: Introduction to basic SEO for new opportunities
Find Bing SEO's significance and unique aspects compared to Google. Learn how to optimize your content for Bing, focusing on exact keyword usage, high-quality content creation, and understanding user intent. Uncover essential tools and strategies to enhance your online visibility and reach diverse audiences effectively.
What is Bing
Have you ever heard about Bing? Bing, Microsoft's search engine, has a far lesser percentage of the search engine industry than Google. In January 2024, the search engine Bing had a 3.43 percent market share. In certain areas, including Russia and China, Bing is less popular as there exist local search engines; Yandex and Baidu, for example.
But Bing has been steadily expanding its influence by its efforts over the years, which cannot be overlooked in SEO. In early 2024, Bing announced Bing ChatGPT, an AI-based search announcement, where you can get instant answers to your questions right on your Chrome extension's new tab. Moreover, following the integration of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, Microsoft's freshly refurbished Bing search engine has reached 100 million users.
The table below shows the use of Bing by country. Bing is popular to some extent in Japan, Germany, and France. (Source: similarweb)
| Country | Percentage |
|---|---|
| China | 36.17% |
| United States | 26.25% |
| Japan | 3.71% |
| Germany | 3.18% |
| France | 3.10% |
| Others | 27.58% |
The Benefits of Bing SEO
Why is it a good idea to optimize for Bing? Bing, with a 3.31 percent desktop search market share in February 2024, less competitive than Google. Despite Google's dominance, Bing has seen its desktop search market rise by 41.03 percent since 2019.
And, Most SEO tactics resemble those used by Google, though Bing openly discloses its ranking factors, allowing you; to target Bing with less effort while reaping similar benefits.
Google vs Bing (Source: GA)
Plus, traffic from Bing may have a lower bounce rate than Google traffic. A bounce rate of less than 10% implies that you have added double tracking to your web pages. So, the meaning of the graph in the above, Bing users visited more pages and clicked more related links than Google users does. With this understanding, it's time to optimize your presence on Bing and maximize its benefits.
How is Bing SEO different from Google
Each search engine has its own unique characteristics. While they may share similar ranking factors, their methods of analysis and ranking differ. Let's explore each engine's approach. The table below summarizes the differences between Bing and Google's SEO perspectives.
| Ranking factors | Bing SEO | Google SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords | Bing prioritizes exact keywords and aims to rank sites that fulfill user’s search intent, employing a direct approach. | Google employs semantic search, analyzing search intent and context alongside related keywords. |
| Backlinks | Bing prefers quality backlinks to number backlinks and domain age. If you have a decent domain age and high-quality links, they will most likely help you rank higher. | Both Google and Bing prioritize backlinks, with Google emphasizing the PageRank of linking domains and favoring sites with more high-quality links. |
| Social signals | Bing considers social media influence as a ranking factor, valuing well-engaged platforms and boosting them in search results. | Google does not believe social signals to be a key influence in page ranking. They consider social media as a technique for increasing traffic to websites, which indirectly enhances ranking but is not a direct ranking factor. |
| Multimedia | Bing can properly crawl and analyze a wide range of multimedia information, even when Flash was prominent. | Multimedia is important for Google, although not as much as Bing. They focus on text-based content. |
| Crawling | Bing does not crawl pages as frequently and focuses mostly on crucial pages. | Google normally indexes and crawls all the pages on your website. |
What matters to Bing
Exact Keyword Usage
Unlike Google, Bing focuses on exact word usage rather than context and meaning. Similar to the main page, employing your precise keywords in the Heading 1 and Heading 2 tags can improve your Bing SEO ranks.
However, using keywords naturally in your text is also a vital consideration. Your keywords should appear organically in the alt tags and meta description.
While Google has disregarded meta keywords and descriptions as ranking factors, a great title and meta description can assist increase your CTR and indirectly influence your Bing search engine ranks.
Write High-Quality Content
Bing prefers websites with original and entertaining information that answers the reader's questions. So, If you want to expand your online presence in Bing, check the bullets below to see what Bing is talking about pillars of quality content.
- Authority : Reliability to content
- Utility : the degree of usefulness and detail of the content
- Presentation : simplicity to search content
The opposite case of Bing’s favorite content (Source: HiT News)
Here is the opposite case of Bing’s favorite content. This page is filled with AD, and it disturbs Bing’s SERP detects what is the main content and topic. This reduces the reliability of your content.
Aside from the three pillars, unlike Google, Bing prefers multimedia, such as flash content. And it is concerned with the "aesthetic appearance or functional ability of a website for end-users." So, it doesn't need to putting in the extra effort to construct a Flash-based website only for Bing. You may just provide a more engaging experience for your readers by using photos and videos in your material.
By including relevant and attractive photos in your content, your brand's visibility in Bing image search results may improve. Simply adding informative alt text to your photographs will increase image search traffic to your website.
Using schema markup on your website can significantly enhance your SEO results.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced a collaboration to improve search results with structured data. Schema markup, which is structured data is a code that communicates your page's meaning and how users should view it to search engines, is essentially a method for search engines to analyze your content and give information-rich search results. It will help in raising the CTR of your search results. And here’s the Bing Markup Validator tool to verify the markup that you’ve added to your pages.
Focus on User Intent and Quality Content
Bing incorporates context and relevance to further refine the process of ranking content in search results. So before creating content, conduct keyword research to understand search intent is essential. Modify keywords on your website where appropriate, prioritizing titles and meta descriptions. Keeping customers satisfied and engaged is crucial; bad content can deter visitors and negatively impact Bing rankings. Additionally, prioritize site design, performance, and navigation to further enhance rankings.
Build Quality Backlinks to Your Website
Because Bing SEO prioritizes link quality over number, you should not spend time and effort obtaining as many backlinks as possible for Bing SEO. Instead, work on acquiring connections from high authority sites that Bing respects, as well as developing unique, interesting content that people want to share.
Bing prefers these two forms of backlinks:
- Organic links from relevant and trustworthy websites that direct genuine visitors to your website. Bing particularly favors.edu,.org, and.gov connections.
- Bing encourages connections from older sites because it considers age to be an indication of trust.
Similar to Google, Bing warns against practices like reciprocal links, purchased links, link schemes, and links from hacked sites, which could lead to rejecting from the Bing index. To assess your backlink profile, consider running a backlink audit using tools like Ubersuggest.
Bing SEO Conclusion
As we've shown in this article, Bing is the third most popular search engine, trailing only Yahoo and Google, and because it uses the same ranking mechanism as Google, less competition may be exposed. Bing's SEO is similar to Google's. Both Bing and Google promote high-quality material in their search engines. However, there are a few more special characteristics in Bing that require further attention.
As a result, effective localization will be achievable if Bing content is prepared and optimized for the target nation. For more information, you can explore below articles.
📚 How to search Bing Keyword and Plan articles with checklist