Aside from Google, Microsoft’s Bing now controls 16% of all online search queries, so a sizeable chunk of the market and one that’s businesses should not ignore.
There are many benefits and opportunities using Bing for an SEO campaign
- Bing’s algorithms are different to Google as they are not as complex which can lead to spamming, however this does mean that SEO strategies that have been devalued by Google can still be effective on Bing making ranking a lot easier.
- Bing is also slower than Google at crawling sites so you may wait longer to see the impact of your SEO strategy when ranking.
- Because fewer people optimise sites for Bing and most webmasters optimise for Google, Bing is a less competitive market place and as a result this can be a good alternative if you are competing with established search results listings on Google and ranking poorly.
So there are many benefits and opportunities with Bing for an SEO campaign, here is some advice to get your site ranked.
- Because the algorithms are less complex with Bing, old SEO techniques that Google phased out are still effective especially keyword-based anchor text such as ‘cheap car insurance quote’ rather than ‘click here’.
- Even better results can be found by using anchor text on in-bound backlinks that relate to the HTML titles of the pages they are pointing at. It is not necessary to use exact keyword combinations, related keywords will be enough for Bings indexing bots and will also protect you from any changes that may be made in the future similar to the Google Penguin change that effected so many SEO campaigns.
- Both Google and Bing like high value content that is published regularly to indexed sites. The more fresh content a website offers, the greater number of keywords can potentially rank.
- Balance between SEO for Bing and for Google – Remember that you have only one website and Google and Bing read the same content so it’s important not to use too many techniques that will work on Bing but not on Google, a healthy balance is key.