As a Digital marketer most of my life revolves around Google and the changes going on at the time. I constantly talk about what’s going on within the algorithm or am busy researching topics around it. Not often do I think about Yahoo or Bing for results because let’s face it, Google runs the space and everyone knows it.

Last month I had a client ask me why we never talk about other search engines for their local ranking so I decided to invest a bit of time in gaining some knowledge about Bing. My client is in an area with a product that has an audience of 40-80 year olds and a lot of them use tablets instead of other devices for the Internet. 87% of Bing users were Internet explorer users before hand and most people using Bing are over the age of 35, which meets this client’s audience as well as device metrics. They still get most of their traffic from Google organic traffic but maybe some knowledge about Bing’s algorithm can’t hurt.

I went through my normal research avenues and came up with some interesting facts about Bing and how it differs from Google.

• Bing relies a lot less on backlinks than Google (no creditability boost for the quality of your backlinks like Google gives you- See “Penguin Update” for details)

• Photos, flash and videos are highly weighted and rewarded. Try putting some videos on the landing pages on your site. Bing rewards pictures, video and audio on pages over just plain text. Google relies much more on text based content and descriptions or tags for pictures. Multimedia does better on Bing search results.

• On page linking is important. Anchor text and hyperlinking keywords are favored. Bing prefers that you link all your keywords (which Google is okay with but you shouldn’t do them ALL! Spammy)

• Age of domain is the most important part of site authority when it comes to Bing’s Algorithm. Other factors like inbound linking, backlinks and page traffic don’t play a factor in Bing’s idea of site authority.

• Fresh content is important but not as much as it is on Google’s algorithm. Actually Bing prefers old content to stay up on your site because that’s something they deem as authoritative. Old is GOLD, for Bing. This is why doing an internal Blog on your URL is a good idea. That content can grow and gain authority to Bing.

• Social media is a huge factor. Are you active on social platforms? Are you consistent? They will rank you better based on your social activity or social signals.

• Bing doesn’t index every page like Google does which is why some weird pages pull on Bing when you search instead of the correct page that has all the information you would need. Example – I searched Home insurance in St. Joseph, MO and it pulled up the “Personal Products” page for the site and not the Home Insurance page.

• Bing pulls exact keywords and isn’t set up to pull only some of the keywords if the content is better like Google would. It pulls exact keywords first and then on later pages will use select keywords in search results.

• Bing prefers that all your important keywords are on top of the page copy. Things like headlines should be optimized for this.

Google is the king but Yahoo and Bing shouldn’t be ignored completely. Some pieces of information I’ve found can be applied to your site and not affect your ranking on Google. Hope this is helpful for your one client who asks you about Bing.

Party on. Ambushed.

 

Bing stats: https://www.aborg.com/2014/08/google-vs-bing-which-one-are-your-customers-using/

Resources:

http://www.webconfs.com/bing-optimization-article-25.php

http://patch.com/connecticut/orange/the-differences-between-google–bing-seo-algorithms

http://searchengineland.com/bing-will-roll-out-their-mobile-friendly-ranking-algorithm-in-the-upcoming-months-220799

http://www.optimizationtheory.com/difference-in-google-and-bings-algorithm/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/6-ways-bing-opposite-google/128935/