Think of SEO and search and you likely think of the gargantuan that is Google.
But that’s not the best way of approaching SEO.
You need to think of the major players with a similar mindset - as in don’t abandon the other ones or have that misguided common belief:
“Well I’ve optimised my Google ranking carefully, so I must be doing alright on Bing and Yahoo.”
No, siree, not necessarily!
Bing has powered Yahoo for the last 10 years and it announced in March 2019 that Bing’s paid ads - Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) - will now be served on the Yahoo search network too.
This means that if you’ve got things right for Bing, you will have things spot on for Yahoo too, as they’re essentially the same framework under two different brands.
However, this doesn’t work for your efforts with Google! So if you’ve abandoned Bing AND Yahoo then you’ve got to think of a joint approach for these two, separate to your Google efforts.
How to Optimise Your Search Efforts and Site for Bing
These are five ways to get started with improving your efforts on the Bing/Yahoo search networks. You should still have a dedicated SEM strategy for Bing/Yahoo but these will ensure that Bing/Yahoo correctly recognise and rank your sitemap and web content.
Submit your site to Bing
In the same way that you need to submit your site to Google Search Console, you must also submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools (registration required) so the platform can crawl your whole site and rank your content accordingly in the SERPs. Bing doesn’t update its index as often as Google, so you will need to wait to see these efforts bear fruit.
Review title tags
Insights from SEJ suggest that Bing places more emphasis on title tags than Google, so you need to review your title tags to ensure they incorporate your keywords. Take care with your keyword strategy as Google can penalise sites with an ‘excessive’ amount of keywords.
Get social!
Bing has confirmed it uses social signals as a big indicator of trust and quality, whereas Google has been vague about how it uses a company’s social media efforts to reward/penalise sites in the rankings.
Backlinks campaign
Bing places more importance on a website’s backlink strategy than Google, with Searchmetrics suggesting “on average, 52-53% of the backlinks of websites ranked among the top 30 results on Bing contain keywords in the anchor text”. According to its research, this is approximately 10% more than Google.
Review technical site performance
Bing focuses on a variety of technical website factors to rank results including:
- Page load speed
- Robots.txt
- Sitemap
- Redirects
- Canonical tags
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