Although Google is the search engine of choice for the majority of internet users, there are some advantages to optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Bing. Bing has the second most used engine after Google, at 21.3% market share in the United States. Because the majority of online marketing is targeted towards Google, Bing has less competition, and you might have an easier time optimizing your website for a better page ranking. There’s also evidence to suggest the quality of traffic coming from Bing is a higher value, with a lower bounce rate than Google users. All of this is in addition to the process of Bing optimization being quite similar to Google – meaning you don’t have to do much extra work to optimize for both.
Social Media Signals
A major difference between Bing and other search engines is that it takes the social media popularity of content into account when searching. If a page has lots of social shares or mentions, Bing considers it to be more popular amongst users, and is more likely to give it a high ranking in a web search. This is a great way to improve your organic rankings without too much additional work on your end, especially if your social media accounts are already up and running.
Site Seniority
Because Bing tends to prioritize older websites, they show an emphasis on valuable content being factually relevant, rather than the more socially relevant content that is highlighted on Google. This can be invaluable when identifying your target demographic – a certain group of users prefer Bing for this reason, and it’s a factor worth considering when identifying your audience persona.
Backlinks
Like Google, Bing prioritizes websites with backlinks from sites it deems to be credible. Unlike Google, however, not having quality backlinks can be detrimental to your page ranking. For a page to maintain its spot in the Bing search index, it must have at least one quality backlink elsewhere on the web. While Google will prioritize backlinked websites, Bing is one of the only search engines that appears to treat it as absolutely necessary to be considered a quality search result.
Keywords are Key
Google’s search algorithm has grown more and more complex, and is able to quickly search many pages of many different websites to give the user the results they are looking for. Bing is less thorough in its search of websites, however, and relies on the first few lines of information on a website to match keywords with. What this means is that relevant keywords in the titles, headings, and opening sentences of your website are more likely to improve your Bing page rank.
When it comes to making sure you’re number one in search results, you must be willing to put the work into research and analytics, to make sure you’re getting an appropriate return on investment for all of your search engine optimization efforts. Longevity Graphics can help you to rank higher in Bing, Yahoo!, and Google search indexes through Webmaster tools, content integration, and keyword density.
Contact Longevity Graphics today for a free one hour consultation, and discover your full online potential.