Bing SEO

Bing SEO Using Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places To Increase Your Local Rankings and Exposure

Bing SEO! It’s something that most businesses ignore, and you can use that to your advantage! Research shows that up to 33% of the US population uses Bing on a monthly basis, with over 5 billion searches on the Bing network each month. Bing has some great SEO tools, just like Google, including Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing Places, and Bing Connected Pages. We’ll break down how to use these tools and get your business listed in Bing, to tap into the hidden audience you may be missing out on!

Don’t miss an episode – listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and more!

YOU’LL LEARN

  • It’s super easy to get your business setup on Bing Places
  • Bing Places is the Bing equivalent to Google My Business (GMB)
  • Yahoo pulls Bing Places business listings into the Yahoo Local search results
  • AOL pulls Bing Places business listings into the AOL local search results
  • Over 5 billion monthly searches on the Bing search network each month in the US
  • Up to 33% of the US market is being served by Bing, via Bing, Yahoo, and AOL
  • You need Yelp reviews because the reviews on Bing Places are provided by Yelp
  • Use Bing Webmaster Tools, which is like the Google Search Console
  • Submit your website to Bing via the Bing Webmaster Tools portal
  • Bing Connected Pages can “connect” your website to your social profiles
  • Many competitors are not active in Bing, so your odds for domination are increased

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 26 Improve Your Bing SEO Ranking With Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places For Your Business;

Jesse: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. Jesse Dolan, with Bob Brennan as
always. And today, we’re gonna be talking about something that’s not a usual topic for a
lot of what we focus on, but Bing.

Everybody’s heard of Bing, probably used Bing at some point or another on accident, or
on purpose, depending on what browser you pull open. But it’s something that goes
ignored, and we wanted to give it some attention here. We definitely try to focus on it
with our business, but it’s usually like a B one priority compared to Google. Google is
just dominant. It’s what we all think of. It’s literally a verb.

Bing really tried to make it a verb. What’s it, MSN search before, so they came up with a
one word thing to be like Google, Bing it. Not quite as sexy. It’s got a ring to it, but not
quite as sexy, but it is something that’s popular. It’s a good chunk of the market out
there, so we wanna focus this episode today on how to get found on Bing.

So, there’s a couple different ways for doing that. We’ve talked a lot about Google My
Business, or GMB, extremely relevant. Obviously, plenty of episodes, we’ll link to a
couple of them in the show notes. Plenty of episodes we talk about that, and you wanna
do that, but you can’t ignore Bing Places.

Very similar concept to Google My Business with some slight differences. And, in some
cases, some people like some of the features a little bit better, but really it’s a Google
My Business clone, as far as the Places part goes. Similar process. You’ve gotta have a
physical address. You gotta sign up for an account. It’s all free. But you gotta have a
physical address, they send you off a postcard for verification. You gotta receive the
postcard, enter in the verification number, and that proves you’re an actual physical
business with an address. And then, you’re listed on there.

Just like the GMB, you can add photos, description of your business, your business
hours, contact information, and all that fun stuff. Something that’s … A lot of people
don’t know though, about Bing Places, is if you go to Yahoo, and you do some searches,
and you get some local results in Yahoo, that same map pack, if you will, the ABC, the
one, two, three with the map listing.

And even AOL, if you go to those and do some searches, that’s all Bing results. That’s
what feeds all that, so by setting up in … I’m sorry. By setting up … See, I just wanted to
say Google there, Freudian slip.

But getting set up on Bing Places, it’s just about Bing. You feed those three other search
engines. Now, that’s not as popular as Google, even when you combine all those
together, but it’s still something that is completely free. It’s gonna take you just a little
bit of time to do it, and then you’re up and running.

The good part about that is a lot of businesses do ignore it. Everybody goes to Google.
So, if you got a hundred competitors, or 50 competitors in town, the odds of all of them
going and getting set up on a GMB are pretty good. You know a lot of them are gonna
be on there. Are they all doing that on Bing Places, probably not. I’m sure there’s less. I
didn’t do the research on this, maybe I should, and if I do I can post it. But I bet you it’s
just not the same. It’s just not a one to one ratio on getting set up on GMB, and Google.
Sorry. I did it again. And on Bing Places. So, if you haven’t done that, check it out.

Some real quick stats that I did pull up, went through a couple different sources, some
from Bing, some from some other independent like Search Engine Land, some third
parties. But in the US, this parts from Bing directly, so take it with a grain of salt, maybe,
a little bit, on how they quantified the data. They use a third party to get the results, but
… And I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. They say 145 million unique users each
month are using the Bing network.

Now again, that’s Bing, that’s Yahoo, and that’s AOL, and CBS I believe. It was CBS
Interactive, or ABC Interactive. I’ll make sure which one that is. That’s a lot of users.
That’s 320 some odd million in the US.

Now, what are they searching for? How many searches? How regular is it? Don’t know,
but that’s still a heck of a lot of searching. They over five billion monthly searches in the
US. I read another report that said six billion searches in the US. So, 145 million users
doing searches to total up to five billion, or six billion searches-

Bob: That’s a gob.

Jesse: It’s a gob, and you got some people that are definitely using it as their regular search
engine. So, anywhere from 24 to 33% of US market is being served by Bing. Now, that’s
pretty big. There are some industry niches, and some verticals that maybe is a lot lower,
some that’s possibly even higher, but you just took at that, even on the low end, being
super conservative, 20%, or 25%, that’s a quarter of your public out there locally. A
quarter of the businesses that you’re A, ignoring if you don’t do this, and B, some of
your competitors are ignoring them by not getting set up in Bing Places.

So, just right, I think that that tells everybody you should get out there. Now, this is all in
the US. Just for as far as a contrast, says here 9.7% of global search happens on Bing. So,
not as popular outside the US. I know we’ve got some people outside the US. We don’t
speak to that as much as we should, but not as dominate to the US, but if you are here
on the mainland … I’m sure in Alaska and Hawaii, too. I don’t know.

I don’t mean to offend the non-48ers, but definitely something you should take
advantage of. And again, why wouldn’t you? It’s free, potentially a quarter of your
audience, and your customer base out there is on Bing, and your competition probably
isn’t. So, get out there.

Bob: And we talked about this as a strategy, even if you don’t have the time and the money,
and you’re absolutely bootstrapping, get your GMB, and then get your Bing listing, and
go from there.

Jesse: Absolutely.

Bob: So, a question I have, Jess, on the Bing …

Jesse: Places.

Bob: Places.

Jesse: I know, it’s weird to say, because we don’t say it a lot.

Bob: GMB, or Google has their own reviews.
Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: Bing has … Are they utilizing Yelp as their review engine? Is that the idea of that
function, because that’s what I’m seeing here, for us at least. And just, again, build your
Bing Places, and you’re gonna have to go out and get Yelp reviews. So, that would be
the strategy if you could do nothing else. If you were so intimidated about website
building, or had no money at all, that would be your strategy.

Jesse: For sure.

Bob: So again, if you’re selling firewood, you have no money. Again, nothing against
firewood, but you get the idea. That is what you would do first. It costs you nothing
other than your time, and you get that going, and then you build from there.

Jesse: Yeah. And to an extent … I don’t know. For some reason, if you’re a business, and you
just never were gonna have a website, this can still serve as your website. You can use
something like bit.ly, B-I-T-dot-L-Y, like a URL shortener. You can grab the link to your
GMB, or in this case your Google … your Bing Places listing.

That’s third strike. Plug it in to a bit.ly, or whatever, and just get a short URL you can put
on your business cards, put in an email, whatever. This is a webpage at the end of the
day. It’s out there. It doesn’t have its own domain like jesse.com, or whatever, but it’s
something that you can put your business hours on. You can put photos of your
business. You can put other descriptive information. And if you just are never gonna get
to the next level having a website, you’re right. This could totally serve as what you need
there.

I don’t know why you’d do that, like stop there, and why you maybe wouldn’t take it to
the next level. Maybe temporarily this would be a solution, but cheap, free, exposure,
and most importantly it’s ranking in the map pack for these various search engines like
we’re talking whether that’s GMB, or the Bing Places, which is where you need to be.
That’s the new playing field for SEO.

So, that’s definitely something that you’re gonna wanna take advantage of.

Bob: You could test a market, too.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: Just say, “Hey, is there a need for this phone repair service in this market?” “Well, I don’t
know. Let’s throw up an GMB, and throw up a Bing. It costs us nothing,” and put a
phone number up there. And say, “Hey, we’re not quite open yet,” or whatever the deal
is for 30 days, and just see. And then, if that works then you roll it out.

Jesse: Yeah, and once it’s hiding that physical address it’s yours. If for some reason that
business fails, you shutter it, you start something up, I don’t know, couple days, couple
weeks later, you can change that name. You can rebrand it, and re go through it, as long
as you have that same physical address. That’s where they want that proof. Now, they
may ask you to reverify it if you change a lot of information. But yeah, you’re right. It’s
great as a free way to test stuff too.

Couple of the Bing things we wanted to make sure we mention here. There’s also a Bing
Webmaster tools, and I’ll put a link to this in the show notes. That’s very similar to
Google Search console, formally Google Webmaster tools. And back in the day, I don’t
know if everybody remembers these services, but you could get a disc from, up here in
the Minnesota, Best Buy, or whatever. Like, “Submit your website to 87 hundred search
engines, and get listed everywhere.” It was actually quite a process to get listed in the
search engines. The very process just took a lot of work.

You don’t have to submit yourself to these search engines anymore. What you do is get
set up in their webmaster tools, or their search console on the Google side. Bing has a
great one. It’s not identical to the GSC, the Google Search console, but it some ways it
has some tools that are pretty unique, and maybe even a little bit better.

It has some cool site explorers to crawl your website, and show … It shows you a little
bit more than Google does, in some regards there. But at the end of the day, this serves
that purpose of submitting … Whoops. At the end of the day, this serves that purpose of
submitting your website to Bing. It’s a free account. You set it up. You submit your site
map, your website. That allows Bing to crawl your website, and find all of your pages, so
then it can put them into the index. Think about it, we explain it to people like a file
cabinet. If you don’t tell Bing, “Here’s all my pages,” they can’t put it in the file cabinet.
So, this is how you literally walk up to Bing. Say, “Hey, check out my website. Here’s all
my webpages, file them away. And if people are looking for these things, pull them out
and serve them up to them on your listing page.” This is where you do that for Bing. If
you’re listing using Google there’s a chance, down the road, through different exposure,
and sharing, you’re gonna get found in Bing too, but if you’re gonna through the process
of having a website, again, this is free. It’s gonna take you just a couple minutes.
Get verified. I’m sorry. Get it uploaded, and put on Bing too, then you’re gonna be
guaranteed to be in Bing. Again, if we’re talking 20%, 25, 33% of your customers out
there are using Bing at one point or another here, what the heck? Get it in there. Make
sure you’re popping up in the search results.

So, another super cool thing that Bing has that Google doesn’t have right now, anything
like this. It’s called Bing Connected Pages. So, we’ve talked in previous episodes if you
have a Facebook account, or Facebook page I should say, with Google you have to send
them the signals, and they need to see that name, address, and phone number
consistent. They need to then relate, and say, “This is their Facebook page. This is their
website. These are connected.”

With Bing, you can actually tell Bing that these are connected. That will do a couple
different things for you. It will help them understand just your overall identities breathe,
and reach, and that this is your Pinterest page, this is your Facebook, this is your Twitter.
And then, they can also give you some analytics, and stats about those visitors, cross
platform, and where people are coming from, and really start to understand that.
Because if they know, this is your Facebook page, and you’re getting traffic to your
website from Facebook, or different search engine, results exposures. Once they know
this is all connected, and part of your brand, and identity, they can serve up a whole lot
of different analytics to you, and things like that. Completely free.

I’ll just read through some of the things that they can connect. They have Myspace listed
on here. I don’t know if that’s actually applicable at all, just jumps out. But, Myspace,
Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Apple Store, Google Play, Linkedin, Google Plus, Twitter,
Facebook, Microsoft App Stores. So, I mean, it’s not the end all be all for connecting
everything, but those are some pretty major players out there.

And again, it’s just a free tool. It’s kind of like a hub and spoke type deal. Your website is
the hub for everything. This helps them identify all different spokes, and the different
spokes of your business, and your entity.

Bob: Sure.

Jesse: It’s pretty interesting.

Bob: Yeah, it is.

Jesse: That’s something, again, it’s completely free to set up. There’s a lot of different crawlers
and stuff here. I’m just looking real quick through the list. I’ll put a link to this in the
show notes. You can go through Bing. What I like doing on some websites, whether it be
some sites that we’re currently managing, or if we’re taking on a project for a new
customer, maybe we’re gonna consult with them, or just give them our two cents, is to
run their websites through Google and Bing. These are like apples and oranges. They
provide the same function, but they have completely different ways of getting there.
What kind of results are there? What kind of errors are they seeing? Google is obviously
dominant. And if we’re gonna chose one or the other we optimize for Google, or fix
Google’s errors.

Bob: Sure.

Jesse: But they’re just gonna show you little bits that are different. So, even if you really don’t
care about ranking in Bing they have some tools, through their Bing Webmaster tools,
that are still pretty useful for webmasters, or business owners just to gain some insights
on what’s happening with your website. So, if nothing else, I would for sure check it out
for that.

Bob: Yeah. It’d be interesting, in another episode, to dig into what would cause … What
might be good for Google would be bad for Bing, or vice versa.

Jesse: Sure.

Bob: Really dig into the SEO element of Bing. And again, it’s not gonna be one of those critical
things you do, but it’s 10 to 20% of search volume. You’d be goofy to ignore it. But then
again, it’s doing the SEO for that, as well, piece.

Jesse: Yeah, that is a great idea. We should really dig in, and see where some correlations, and
causalities are there. Because again, depending on your market, and where your
customers are if for some reason you uncover your … in that unique niche where a lot of
your traffic does come from Bing, you’re gonna wanna optimize for that.

So, and something else here too I just got in the notes to discuss is, this is all dynamic if
you go back a number of years. So like I said, the Bing network feeds Yahoo, and feeds
AOL. They used to be their own search engines.

Bob: Yep.

Jesse: There’s other search engines that may evolve in the future. Things are so dynamic, and
changing. We’ve got mobile. We use Siri. There’s different voice navigation. I know
Apple’s working on their own Apple Maps type deal. But in the past some of that
connected through Bing, or some of the search results that Siri might serve up were
through Bing. I don’t think they are anymore, but they could be again in the future.
So, whatever stats we’re sharing here today are just current stats. This stuff could shift.
Users could shift. If, right now, you’re in a position where not all of your competition is
playing in the Bing arena, if you can get in there, establish yourself, and if things start to
sway the other way down the road, guess what, you’re a leader. You’re not playing
catch up at that point. You’ve been there. You’ve been dominant. You’re in favor of
Bing, because they’ve had you in there for a while, and they’re compared somebody
new against you. Why wouldn’t you do it?

So, is it gonna transform your life, and transform your business? Maybe not, probably
not, but again, why would ignore potentially a quarter, or even, like you’re saying, on
the low end, if it’s 10% who wouldn’t love to have a 10% bump in your business, you
know what I mean?

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: So, get out there. Check it out. Are you already listed, or not? Do some searches in Bing,
compare. Like Bob was just saying, we’ll definitely do a future episode and some testing.
It’s gonna take a little while, but on Bing verses Google, and just the different tactics.
But right now, search yourself. Do it from a work computer on an IP, do it from home,
do it on your mobile. Try to test it from a few different IP address, so they don’t get your
history, and see different locations. But test Google against Bing, and just see where
you’re showing up right now. And get yourself registered, get on there, and take
advantage of it.

Again, it’s free. Why wouldn’t you do?

Bob: Yeah. I was just looking at one of our clients that came up on Bing, and they’re in the
map packs, they’re number one. But their Yelps reviews … Excuse me. Their Yelp
reviews are three, or three and a half.

Jesse: Okay.

Bob: And the number two guy’s five.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: So, we gotta talk to our clients, say, “Hey, you need to use review lead,” or, “You gotta
get your reviews up, because that will effect things dramatically.

Jesse: Like I always say, even if you’re in the number one spot, but if the two or three people
underneath you, second and third post underneath you I should say, has better reviews,
or more reviews then their ranking doesn’t matter at that point. So, that’s a great point.
So, check it out everyone. Again, check out the show page, intrycks.com/show. We’ll put
all the different links, and things that we’re talking about here in those notes, help you
guys out. If you got a topic you want us to talk about, or something to expand on let us
know on that page as well, intrycks.com/show. This is where we get our ideas from your
guys, what we wanna talk about. This is where you guys tell us what’s important. Ask
questions, clarify. If we say something wrong let us know there too. Any feedback is
good feedback.

So, go ahead and reach out to us, intrycks.com/show. This week here, let’s get into our
five star review of the week. We’ve got a great one here from HCSMSD. Says … Well,
five star review. So, thanks for that. Says, “People get so caught up in social media, and
don’t want to think about SEO, but this podcast tells you why you need SEO. Easy, and
actionable steps.”

Thank you very much. This is what we’re trying to do, let people know that you still
gotta do this stuff. And, to an extent, social and SEO it’s all blended up nowadays, too.
And you just have to have a strategy. There’s so much to do. You can’t just have a
Facebook page, or you can’t just have a GMB, or you can’t just have a Bing Places, or just
a website to really be out there and dominate, and be a big factor in your local market.
You have to have all of this. You have to tie it all in together.

So, hopefully week to week we’re helping you guys navigate those waters, and get this
all figured out. So, thanks for the great review. Everybody else out, loved to get a review
from you. Helps us out on iTunes, helps us get more exposure, and helps us just feel
good too. We like reading. We like sharing them, and when we check this out every
week it’s like, “Oh, we got another review. You’re doing an awesome job. Soon to make
a million dollars, I’m sure.”

But, no. It’s just great to get good, positive feedback. Everybody loves it, including us.
So, intrycks.com/iTunes will take you to the spot to do that, and we just love to hear
from you, so let us know.

All right everybody, that’s about it for this week. Hope you enjoyed the show, and we’ll
see you next week.

Check out the show notes below for resource links, guides, and a link to watch the episode in video format!

To share your thoughts:

  • Send us a comment or question in the section below.
  • Share this show on Facebook.

To help out the show:

  • Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.
  • Subscribe on iTunes.
  • Subscribe on Google Play.
  • Subscribe on Stitcher.

LINKS

MP3 Audio DOWNLOAD THE MP3 AUDIO FILE

Listen to the episode however you like with the audio file.

VideoWATCH VIDEO OF THE SHOW

RESOURCES

Note: some of the resources below may be affiliate links, meaning we get paid a commission (at no extra cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.

SHOW FEEDBACK

We're here to help! Share your thoughts on what you'd like us to focus on, or what challenges you are facing right now.