Everything Local Businesses Need To Know About Bing

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Google may be the top dog in the world of search, but that doesn’t mean local businesses should ignore Bing completely. In fact, when optimized properly Bing can be incredibly useful to businesses everywhere.

In this article, we’ll explain why Bing is a really powerful search engine, how it can help your local business and how you can optimize your site for Bing.

 

Why Bing is secretly great

Bing is the third largest search engine in the world, and the second most popular in many people’s eyes. In 2018, Bing was able to account for 4.58 percent of global searches. That may not seem like a lot at first glance but it accounts for billions of queries.

What you may not know is that Yahoo!, the second largest search engine in the world, is actually powered by Bing. So by optimizing for Bing you are also optimizing for Yahoo! at the same time and killing two birds with one stone.

 

Grow your reach with Bing

It’s only natural that most businesses focus the majority of their search efforts on Google. It is by far the largest search engine in the world and the first place that most people turn go to find the answers they are looking for.

But Bing and Yahoo! shouldn’t be ignored. They are more popular in certain areas of the world (like Asia) but they can also help you drive traffic to your website no matter where in the world you are.

 

How to Optimize Your Website for Bing

Bing uses a different algorithm than Google. So by optimizing for Google you are not necessarily optimizing for Bing at the same time. They do share certain similarities, however. Here’s what you need to do to optimize for Bing.

 

Step 1: Register your business

You’ll first need to claim your business in Bing. This will allow Bing to properly show your local business in local search results.

Doing so will ensure that you have all your bases covered when it comes to local search. Not everyone uses Google, after all.

All you have to do is go to Bing Places for Business and create or claim your business’ listing. As the two search engines are connected, you will automatically get listed on Yahoo! when you claim your Bing Places account.

 

Step 2: Have your website indexed

Once you have registered your local business on Bing Places ,you’ll need to make sure that your website is indexed in Bing. You can create a Bing account to do so or you can log in through your Outlook or Microsoft account.

Once logged in, head over to the Big Website Submission page and fill in the form. You’ll then be able to submit your XML sitemap for Bing to crawl.

 

Step 3: Perform SEO

You’ll need to do SEO for Bing, but a lot of this will be the same as it is for Google. Here’s what you should be doing to optimize for Bing:

  • Do your keyword research onBing
  • Tag and categorize your content
  • Avoid any blackhat practices. Bing is as good as Google at stopping them.

If you need help getting started on Bing, reach out to our experts for a free consultation.