Bing Matters!
Voice Search and Virtual Assistants
Optimizing your website for voice search in 2020 is no longer an option, it’s a must. It’s no secret that voice search has increased drastically over the last few years and is predicted to continue to increase. More people are using their mobile phones and Artificial Intelligence(AI) virtual assistants than ever before. Some of the most popular virtual assistants are Amazon’s Echo Dot (aka Alexa) and Google Home along with Siri and Microsoft Cortana.
So What Does This Have to do With Bing?
There are several reasons that you should care about Bing for voice search. One of the biggest reasons is that Amazon’s Echo Dot uses Bing. Google is the most popular search engine by far, but since so many people are purchasing these devices they are by default using Bing. So you don’t want to leave out Bing completely. Windows also uses Bing by default so if the primary search engine isn’t changed to Google, then people are searching with Bing instead.
How Bing Started
Bing search engine launched in 2009 by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft’s previous search engines were MSN and Live Search. In 2010 Microsoft made an agreement with the networking site, Facebook, which was the 2nd most visited website after Google and agreed to show Bing results to users worldwide. Eventually, Bing became the 2nd most popular search engine behind Google at that time. This still rings true if you don’t include YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Fast forward to November 2014, Amazon’s Echo Dot was released and since then it has become a popular and convenient tool to find answers quickly in the American household. Microsoft was ahead of Google by two years with voice assistance. Two years later, Google launched Google Home which uses Google Assistant. In 2019 it was reported that 27% of people have these AI virtual assistants in their homes. 66% of them own an Amazon Echo Dot. In 2018 Amazon and Microsoft teamed up to implement Microsoft Cortana and Alexa to be available on Windows 10 devices and Echo speakers. Amazon Echo device sales continue to rise.
Since Echo devices are using Bing, it makes sense to optimize your website for Bing.
Differences Between Bing and Google
Bing and Google are pretty comparable but there are differences. Google has instant search, voice search (search with microphone), and integration with many Google products like Gmail. Google is much more complex than Bing when it comes to rankings. It has been said that Google considers 200 ranking factors when ranking a page or website to give the user the most relevant information possible. Bing is viewed as a more simple search engine on the other hand. Bing has a few advantages over Google. Bing has a better way to search for images than Google does. This is a popular opinion among many people. There is also the Microsoft Rewards Program for users. If you sign up, it allows you to gain points by searching on Bing in order to redeem gift cards. Bing also takes the privacy of the user extremely seriously and without Bing, there would be no viable privacy-centric API.
If you’re looking to gain some visibility on Bing, here are 5 ways that you can use Bing to your advantage for SEO:
- Check Your Rankings:
- Bing Business Listing (Local):
- Clicks Distance and Search History:
- Bing and Social Media:
- Keywords:
When a website has a major rankings dip, check Bing to see what the visibility looks like. Sometimes this can be an indicator that Google had an algorithm update. Or if you know that Google had an algorithm update, keep an eye on your Bing results. Bing stays pretty consistent where Google changes more frequently. Your site can still generate leads from Bing as well. It might be a smaller percentage of people, but those leads matter too.
Update your Bing business listing to make sure that company info is accurate. This seems like a no-brainer but oftentimes SEOs have the mentality that the listing isn’t being seen because so few people use Bing. If the company is not on Bing, a listing should be created and the name, address, and phone number should stay up-to-date. You could be losing some users or leads from not updating this.
If it takes several clicks for the user to get to your important page on your website, Bing is not ranking it as an important page. Keeping your important pages deep in your site is not good for SEO. If it takes 4 or more clicks to get to, Bing will not rank it. Bing also considered the user’s search history to rank pages. Google does this as well and making sure that your pages are not buried helps with both search engine rankings. Videos can also be watched directly in search results on Bing so update video schema on your website.
Bing integrates social media results in search. Bing has an advantage over Google on this one!
Bing ranks keywords in search and goes based on frequency. Make sure you use keywords in your headers, title tags, and content is very important. It is important to not overdo this since you want to optimize for Google at the same time and overusing keywords can look “spammy”.
Bing controls about 36% of desktop mobile searches. With Bing on the rise, it is important to consider Bing when looking into search results and optimizing your site for SEO. At RYNO Strategic Solutions, we optimize for both search engines to make sure that you are getting the most visibility possible.