When we talk about SEO, we usually swear by Google, to the point of forgetting its alternatives.
However, the US giant is far from the only player in the market, and its competitors offer significant opportunities in terms of SEO.
The most important of them: Bing, from Microsoft.
Being well referenced on Bing is useful!
Despite its clear domination of the search engine market, Google is not omnipotent.
SEO optimization for Bing, therefore, offers real opportunities to capture visitors to your website, especially since it is less competitive than Google.
And, while Bing is constantly advancing and getting close to Google on many points, it does have some good features to know.
Bing likes to find the exact wording of the keywords
For several years now, Google has been striving to make SEO optimization much more “natural”.
He appreciates the rich language, the synonyms and the respect of the syntax: that is why it has become obsolete to focus on keywords “in the strict sense”.
For example, if you were targeting the keyword “website creation”, you could (in absolute terms) reach the first position on Google using similar phrases like:
“Create a website”;
“Site Design”;
“Website development”
Bing, on the other hand, has a more direct approach.
Which means it’s better to literally use the keywords you’re targeting in strategic places:
- The SEO title (<title> tag);
- Title and subtitles (H1, H2, etc.);
- The meta-description
The URL is more important for Bing
On the side of Google, the importance of the URL of a page in its referencing is rather relative.
On Bing, on the other hand, the domain names and the URLs containing precisely the searched keywords seem favored.
On Google, the two best Bing results are much less well ranked, and the URL seems to contribute less to the ranking.
Of course, this is not a universal rule, but the match between the keywords and the domain name or URL seems generally stronger at Bing.
Backlinks should lose importance for Bing
To obtain external links pointing to its site is to get the Grail in SEO.
However, Google gives special importance to the quality of backlinks, a ton of external links can have a more negative impact than anything else.
A study by Search Metrics (dating from 2013) pointed to the importance of the number of backlinks for SEO Bing.
Conclusion
Too much focus on Google, your site may miss out on real opportunities to gain traffic on alternative search engines like Bing.
Although this engine is more and more advanced and approaches Google in many aspects, it may be useful to know these few features to boost its SEO.
The ideal is of course to find a balance to rank well on ALL search engines
Water Damage SEO Geeks further compares Google SEO and Bing SEO which will help you in making a more informed decision on which direction you would like to go.
