Getting your website found as often and easily as possible is a challenge – not an insurmountable one, but a challenge nonetheless.
And with Google the dominant search engine with over 86% of all search traffic, it’s likely that most of your web platforms will be geared towards optimizing for their algorithms.
But Bing also commands enough of a market share, at nearly 7%, to warrant paying attention to optimizing for their algorithms too.
So how do you go about doing that? Here are some tips and pointers…
Firstly, it’s a good idea to unpack the differences between Google and Bing as well as the similarities, so that you know why and how to tweak your SEO accordingly.
So let’s start there – the fundamental differences between Google and Bing are as follows:
Demographics – Google tends to be the predominant search engine for people in white-collar professions whereas Bing tends to be used more by people in blue collar professions.
In age strata, Bing’s users are predominantly over 35, where Google’s are under 35, and perhaps the most significant difference is that Bing’s users are almost all in the United States, whereas Google has a far broader international user base.
In terms of SEO, there are differences too, as follows:
- Google reads keywords in a contextualized manner, where Bing tends to focus just on the specific keyword itself
- For websites with multimedia elements such as video and images, Bing attributes a higher ranking value on average than Google does.
- Bing is also a better crawler of websites using Flash
- The biggest differentiator, however, is that Bing attributes value and rank based on a website’s social media links far more heavily than Google does. Websites with strong links to multiple social media pages with good engagement score highly on Bing, but it’s far less a factor for Google.
Are there similarities between Google and Bing?
Yes indeed, there are a fair few basic SEO practices that both search engines consider as part of their ranking criteria, for example:
- High-quality and multiple, contextualized backlinks will be viewed favourably by both
- Your keywords will need to include geo-specific words as both Google and Bing take location into account when ranking search results
Top Tip: Do ensure that you have both a Google Business page and a Bing Business page to cover both possible lead generators, and make use of Bing’s Webmaster tools which, like Google’s, will help you optimise your Bing listing across the board.