SEO On Google vs Bing
Google often dominates the SEO conversation with most businesses optimizing solely for the reigning champ of search engines, but it turns out, to have a solid SEO strategy you need to take Bing into account as well. “Great,” you think, “now we have to optimize for Bing, too? Is it really worth it?” Well, now that the combined strength of Bing and Yahoo dominates around 30% of the market share for search, and the paid search share of the network is expected to continue it’s trend of upward growth, Bing is increasing grabbing the attention of those looking to reach a wider audience and rank higher on both search platforms.
Why Bother with Bing?
In addition to Bing’s growing market share, there are a number of reasons that optimizing your site for Bing is a good idea. To begin with, since so many websites focus on optimizing only for Google, you can help put yourself ahead of your competition by positioning your business in front of the 30% of searchers using Bing and Yahoo. That’s a lot of eyes, and a lot of potential customers that your competitors may be ignoring.
There are also some differences in the demographics of people who search using Bing and Yahoo compared to those who most often use Google. Depending on your target audience, you may want to consider the parts of the country (Great Plains, Rust Belt, Southern States) or the types of households (politically conservative) that are more likely to use Bing over Google.
And, as we know, Google frequently updates its algorithms, which can sometimes leave company’s scrambling to adjust to the changes. Should this happen to you and your high ranking position suddenly drops, its good to know that you’ll still reach a wide audience on Bing and Yahoo, while you worh towards adapting to the new Google changes.
How Is Bing SEO Different than Google SEO?
Alright, let’s get down to the differences that you came here for. To begin, take a look at the key Bing SEO ranking factors found to be most important by a recent SearchMetrics analysis.
- Top brands tend to rank higher, just as they do on Google.
- Social signals correlate very closely with higher rankings.
- Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings as well.
- Relevant and quality content are important for search rankings.
- On page technical factors also play an important role.
Here’s a closer look at these factors, as well as some others that you should consider when optimizing for Bing.
Brand Preferences and Website Type
Similar to Google, Bing seems to give ranking preference to brands and doesn’t necessarily apply the same criteria as it does to other domains. Both search engines seem to consider it natural for brands to have more backlinks with the name of the brand in the in the link text alone, known as “brand links”, and not rate them negatively as they might with others. That said, Bing does seem to have some difficulty distinguishing brands from related competitors.
Bing also seems to favor older websites with more official domain names, such as .gov or .edu, more than newer, commercial or popular websites that tend to be favored by Google. This means that Bing is more inclined to favor more factually relevant results over socially relevant sites, a factor to consider depending on your target audience.”
h/t to ignitevisibility.com for this info!
