With 76% market share, it is safe to say Google dominates search on the web in every aspect. When comparing Bing VS Google, it is often clear for many, who they will try to rank for. But being this dominant, also brings cons you should consider when doing your SEO for your website.
With 24% of market share left, there is still plenty of potential traffic to hunt for. The majority of this traffic, comes from Bing. As a marketeer, looking into how to rank for this search engine, is a smart thing to do.
With so many trying to rank in Google, there is also a lot of competition. Even for local search, competition can be fierce. Whilst on Bing, although there is still competition, it is far less than on Google.
This is why it is far more realistic to aim for a higher ranking in Bing than it is on Google, especially if you are a small company, or if you are just starting out.
Bing and Yahoo
Whilst optimizing your site for Bing, you will be delighted to know that you will automatically be optimizing your site for Yahoo as well. This is because they use the same algorithm as a result of a deal that was made between Microsoft and Yahoo. Therefore, you will kill two birds, with one stone! Another plus!
Amazon
On a side note, it is worth mentioning that there is a shift taking place when it comes to product search. Whilst officially not a search engine, 50% of the product searches today start on Amazon. This impacts the pay per click (PPC) business for Google as well as Bing, where a lot of these products are being advertised.
Establishing SEO Goals
Your approach towards SEO should be like any other goal you have for your business. The SMART approach is what you need, which stands for:
- Specific. Your goals must be defined as clear and specific as possible. This way, it will make them easier to measure.
- Measurable. The goal should be quantifiable in order to check if the target was met.
- Attractive. The goal must make sense and must be of value to your project, otherwise it makes no sense to start it in the first place.
- Realistic. Are you capable of attaining those goals you created? You can make the most ambitious goals in the world, but if it isn’t possible to meet these targets, it is useless.
- Timely. There should be a deadline when the target should be met.
Taking this approach, you might quickly run into some issues when trying to rank in Google for a strong keyword. Chances are you are facing tuff competition from others who are trying to rank for this keyword. In this case, problems start at the realistic part.
Roughly, Bing has a more traditional approach for ranking. Everything you used to do six years ago for SEO in Google, now applies to Bing. So relatively speaking, it should be quite easy to rank. So what did we have to do again six years ago in Google to get a high ranking?
Keywords
That said, keywords come to mind. You would just include these in your article as much as you can, in order to get a solid ranking on Google, but not anymore. However, this still seems to be effective in Bing. Especially in the URL and the met description.
Bing focuses more on the exact keywords and the words in the URL. As a result, there seems to be a high correlation between the search query and the name of the URL you see on the SERP. In contrast, Google examines the keywords in connection to the context of the content to figure out the semantic meaning of the article.
Backlinks
Backlinks are important for SEO, no doubt about it. There is a difference though between search engines. Whilst Google is more focused on the quality of backlinks to your page, Bing is more focused on the quantity of backlinks that are directed to your page. This means, provided that these are not spam, building up a large backlink network is a solid strategy when trying to rank in Bing.
Multimedia
Next difference is multimedia. Bing loves it. Weather it are videos or images, Bing seems to favor articles that includes them over articles that doesn’t, despite the textual content may be of higher value. Google is better at placing the value on text to determine where to rank it on the SERP.
Social Media
Last but not least is social media. Social shares and signals from these platforms tends to impact the ranking in Bing more than in Google. Likes, comments and shares indicate that the content is relevant and important, thus worth ranking higher.
As expected, Google ranks mobile friendly website over website which are not. Bing is not that interested yet in looking at this.
Google seems to rank websites that show newer content higher, then websites that contain older content. This makes it harder for ever-green content to rank in Google, which is content that is more contemporary and isn’t subject to trends, which makes it last longer. Again, Bing isn’t really looking at this factor.
Despite these differences, it is certainly possible to optimize your website for both search engines. Keywords for example are still very important for both, to figure out what your page is about. So in both cases, using keywords is important.
And just because Bing prefers multimedia and social shares more than Google does, doesn’t mean you will get punished in Google when you include them. Moreover, google prefers these too, but just less than Bing does.
One of the first things you need to do, to set up your site for Bing, is to create an account with Bing Webmaster Tools. This is similar to Google, where you can upload your sitemap and have Bing crawl your website.
Maybe your site is already ranking on Bing. Insert site:yoursite.com in the search box to see how many pages you are already ranking for. If you have a new site, it may take a whilst for Bing to find you. In order to speed up the process, you can submit your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
You should know that Bing requires you to submit a clean sitemap. It allows for not more then 1% of your site the have URL’s that are directed to a 404 page.
If you are running your website on WordPress, it is simple to have your site indexed by Bing. Simply, upload the sitemap you can create with the free plugin Yoast into the webmaster tools from Bing. Then, add the verification tool you got from Bing into the webmaster tools in Yoast, and hit save.
The last step you should return to Webmaster Tools and click the verify button to establish the connection, and your done!
As you can see, you can also enter the verification tools for other search engines in this section. They all work more or less the same way.
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