Optimize For Bing Traffic

A comprehensive guide to optimizing for the Bing search engine, increase your traffic from Bing with a few simple changes to the way that you work online!

Are you winning as much traffic from Bing as you should be? I am not yet, I can tell you that. Bing has shown considerable growth since its launch in 2009, in fact as of June 2012 it accounted for over 13% of US search engine queries. That is astonishing growth, and has come mainly at the expense of Yahoo. Thankfully, and I say this because I rely on Google traffic and adore Google as a result, the market leader has not suffered too badly. At least, Google has pretty much consolidated its market share over this period. I was actually pretty fearful of Bing when it emerged, I concentrate my efforts solely on Google. We must embrace change however, and right now that means learning how to deal with the switch from Yahoo to Bing as a secondary major traffic source.

As a result no doubt of some of my localized subject matter, and my tendency to write in British English, I am actually far less reliant on American traffic than most. At least, less reliant than Americans. According to Google Analytics just 51% of my traffic for December 2011 was American, whilst 13% was from the UK, 7% was from India, and 6% was from Canada. Many bloggers that I know report that upwards of 70% of their traffic is American, hence the reason that some are more affected by this swing. In the UK, in many countries in fact, Google holds a market share of in excess of 90%. It is in the US that the market is much more open, Google have a market share of around 65% of American search queries, Yahoo! now have 15%, and Bing hold 13%.

Winning Bing Traffic

Why, therefore, if Google.com processes approximately six times more search queries than Bing do my traffic statistics show that in the past 30 days Bing sent me less than 3% of the traffic of Google.com? If I was using only this statistic as a benchmark, I would assume that Google processes almost thirty times the number of searches. Remember that Google.com is the American version of the Google search engine, if somebody from the UK enters www.google.com in the URL bar it would switch to www.google.co.uk, a Canadian would be switched to www.google.ca. Therefore I can conclude that Bing is sending me much less traffic then it potentially should be. This is a concerning development for many web marketers, me included; www.search.yahoo.comwas once one of my top three traffic sources, it is now my seventh most prevelant traffic source. This would not concern me had Bing overtaken Yahoo! in the league table, however Bing is also sitting at a lowly 8th. This is consistent with the belief that Yahoo! still holds a slightly larger market share than Bing, yet this still shows that Google is sending me a much higher proportion of their traffic than either Bing or Yahoo.

Optimize For Bing

So, how can we embrace this change? Perhaps 'adapt' is a more applicable word, in the circumstances, seeing as marketers are not going to have much choice but to try and consolidate if Yahoo! continues to decline in America. Thankfully, Google is not currently losing market share. I say that for purely selfish reasons, I am in the overwhelming majority of web marketers who have established their incomes off of the back of the Google algorithm. We are all well versed in at least the very basic best practice for Google optimization, yet must of us should surely consider the possibility of a fast changing market to be a long term threat to our businesses. I decided, therefore, to do some research into the current SEO talk about Bing. Is there anything that we can do differently to improve our performance in Bing? Are people doing so already? Can this be done without compromising our Google performance? There are so many questions to be asked, and I found some great answers.

Ranking In Bing

The widespread belief is that Bing are not all that different from either Yahoo! or Google when it comes to common factors in search engine placement, there are a few popular theories floating around however; most of which will have no effect on your Google optimization. Here are some of the most established and acclaimed tips and tricks:

• Bing is said to love anchor text in inbound links even more than Google does.

• Find backlinks on sites and pages which are very well ranked by Bing. Remember that PageRank is a Google concept, Bing has its own unique algorithm; an authority site on Google may not necessarily be considered an authority site by Bing, your treasured PageRank 7 backlink may not hold much weight with Bing.

• Some webmasters have reported that Bing has more respect for social media. Your unconventional NoFollow Facebook shares may be noticed by Bing, and totally disregarded by Google.

• It is often said that Bing focusses more on your on-page optimization, and less on your off-page optimization. Backlinks no doubt play a part in their ranking algorithm, yet your keyword density and selection could be critical.

• Microsoft themselves have pointed out that there are more long tail opportunities in Bing for webmasters, and as a result less short tail opportunities, due to the 'categorized' results feature. Do you tend to stick with short tail URLs? Fantastic for Google, if you can manage to rank on the first page, in fact potentially your bread and butter. But with Bing, your long tail titles are more likely to become the bread winners.

• Consider registering your website with Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your site maps and analyse the keyword performance of your site.

• Consider reading the Guidelines For Successful Indexing section of the Bing Webmaster Center, if your website is not indexed at all, or only in part. 

• If you are not indexed at all, then consider submitting your site to Bing, which will place your domain or URL on a waiting list for a Bing bot.

• It is believed that Bing has still not completely finished indexing and ranking old pages, a process which could take them several more months. Just think, Bing has effectively had to index what Google has indexed over the past 12 years. You may find thatpre -Bing content, and older micro-sites, are not performing as well as your fresher post-Bing content. Be patient, the Bing bots have been busy since 2009.