When you need to find something out, there can be this lull before someone says to search it. Specifically, they usually say to “Google it,” but once in a while someone says, “Bing it.” It’s probably funny to do and usually ends in someone using Google instead. But is Bing really something to joke about when it makes up 18% of search traffic? With that many users, how can any law firm or small business justify ignoring SEO for Bing?
Of course, Google has a stranglehold on the search engine industry because of how useful and easy its platform is to use. That doesn’t make Bing useless. In fact, it has several better features that do certain things better than Google.
What Bing is better at has led to Bing getting more than 1 billion views each month. This is potentially thousands, maybe millions of views you’re not getting by ignoring Bing SEO. But for so long, all we’ve talked about is how to optimize your site’s SEO for Google, how is Bing different? Let’s talk about that.
How is Bing Different From Google?
Before getting into the specifics of how to optimize your website’s SEO for Bing, we need to understand the strengths that make it a different platform from Google. Currently, Google’s functionality is optimized for text search. This means it uses keywords to find web pages and produces text-based web pages before anything else. This also means that Google’s ability to search for and through images and videos isn’t as strong as it could be.
The same is not true of Bing. Bing is optimized to take images and videos and search for the web pages or sources for them. This gives Bing a multimedia focus that Google doesn’t have, which will affect how certain actions on a web page affect your website’s Bing SEO.
How is SEO for Bing Different From Google?
They both search through a page, taking the text and content into account, but they weigh aspects of a web page’s content differently. There are three big differences between SEO for Bing and SEO for Google. These differences define how you should and can optimize for both Google and Bing.
Bing SEO Values Internal SEO over External
We’ve mentioned external links and backlinks a lot for Google. External links are links you put in your web pages and blogs that lead to sites outside of your own. Backlinks are when outside sites link to your pages. Google sees these links as signs of validation for your page’s content. Bing sees these links in the same light but doesn’t weigh them as highly as Google does.
External links and backlinks don’t lift up your web page on Bing as much as they do on Google. In turn, your usage of keywords in web pages means a lot to Bing. Bing scrutinizes your use of keywords more than Google. Bing wants to know if a keyword is in your meta description, page title, and subheadings.
So while you should already be putting your keyword in the meta description, page titles, and subheadings, it means more here. With Google, you can get away with not using it in your URL or title if the target keyword doesn’t make grammatical sense, you should still try and make it work so it appeals to Bing.
Bing SEO Values Social Media Where Google Doesn’t
How Google quantifies social media sites has always been a point of contention. To compete, Bing has made a point to value a brand’s mentions on social media and do its best to connect your website to your social media accounts.
If you mention certain keywords, link to your website from social media, or just have active social media accounts, Bing takes them into account and raises your page’s rankings in their search results.
This also works both ways, where no social media presence can hurt your Bing SEO. So in basic terms, you shouldn’t leave your social media sites starving.
Bing SEO Values Multimedia Content Where Google Doesn’t
Google values multimedia content like videos, images, and audio to an extent, but not to the degree that Bing does. Google values your keyword mentions in the alt text of your images and values your video and audio content as external links if they come with them. If your multimedia content is hosted on your site, they don’t affect your rankings in Google search all that much, if at all.
Bing, on the other hand, boosts pages with multimedia content hosted and linked to in their content. This makes sense considering how the search engine is optimized to search for videos and images.
So if you have a video, image, or audio file that can add content to your site, know that you’ve boosted your SEO for Bing considerably.
Work With a Marketing Firm to Improve Your Bing SEO
Trying to keep track of your SEO on Google is difficult enough. Tracking and improving your SEO on Bing is another hassle that may be too much for you to deal with. But with a billion views every month, you can’t afford to ignore the platform.
Contact a marketing firm that can handle your website’s SEO for you. ENX2 Marketing is a firm experienced in optimizing SEO across all the major search engines. If you work with us, you’ll see your pages start to rise in the search results on Google and Bing. Contact us today.