SEO is a great way to bring in organic traffic. With the segmentation of the internet today, just focusing on Google traffic might be limiting yourself.
Bing SEO is something you won’t hear people bragging about too much, but it can be a great source of traffic in a crowded niche. Why just look to one platform when you could optimize your content for more than one place?
Multi-platform SEO
Don’t place all your eggs in one basket. As the largest search engine in the world, Google may feel like a pretty safe place to rely on for traffic, but you’ll be better off if you optimize your content to perform well on multiple other platforms, not just Google. Plus, with access to so many AI tools to help in your SEO strategy, it’s not even a stretch to make it work.
Although other platforms don’t bring in as much traffic as Google, there’s still huge potential to grow your traffic when you optimize for other search engines. Bing, in particular, is the second-largest search engine in the world. Why not optimize your content to capture traffic from multiple places, instead of just sticking with the top?
When you’re just starting with multi-platform SEO, look to expand from Google alone to Google and Bing, the top two search engines. If you want to keep going from there, you can then look at other search engines like Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, or Ecosia.
Beyond just the size, Bing can be a great asset to your overall SEO strategy for a few other reasons. Let’s dive into a few of the main ones.
1. Bing Does AI Chat Right
Bing Chat is a really helpful part of Bing search today. It gets a lot of use in addition to regular searches, bringing up the total potential traffic from Bing.
Unlike many of the other AI chatbots people use for search, Bing can perform searches to help you find answers. It also presents links and sources for answers, giving you more opportunities to get your content in front of people, even if they don’t directly search for your keywords.
While Bing Chat may not be the most powerful AI for writing prompts or generating images, that’s not really the purpose of it. It’s essentially a search assistant, helping people reach the most relevant pages more quickly and more often.
The great thing about Bing Chat is that you don’t have to do any additional optimization for your pages to show up in answers. If you’re ranking well on a topic that’s related to what the person is searching for, your links may be given to them as sources for reference and further reading.
Just like that, you could be served up relevant traffic on a silver platter. That’s a lot more appealing than the constant fight over position zero!
2. Bing Traffic May Be More Relevant
Because of the way Bing’s algorithm works, it can sometimes produce stronger leads than Google. This helps to compensate for the lower traffic numbers Bing pulls. It’s better for you to have lower overall traffic if that traffic is more relevant to the purpose of your page.
Although it may not be the case in every industry, traffic from Bing tends to have a slightly higher conversion rate than Google traffic. You can also see a lower bounce rate since people seeing your content are actually people who match your target audience profile well.
With every update, Bing’s search algorithm is getting better and better. Despite its lower usage numbers, it’s growing every year, taking more of the global search engine pie and stealing users from competing platforms (largely from Google).
It’s not a miracle remedy for your site, but Bing traffic can provide a nice boost to your numbers.
3. Bing is Less Competitive
How many people do you know who are purposely doing SEO for Bing? Most people tend to focus only on Google for SEO or spread their focus to other large non-search platforms like social media platforms or YouTube.
By purposely optimizing your content for Bing, you can improve your search rankings on the platforms and collect a larger piece of the pie for yourself. If you’re one of only a few people focusing on being competitive on Bing, you’re in a great position to ace your rankings and get great results on a ton of your top keywords.
While Bing is much less competitive than Google for many keywords (especially long-tail keywords), it’s good to remember that you’re not swimming in that ocean alone. You won’t be the only one looking to rank on Bing, but because people are still mainly focused on Google rankings, you’re more likely to find keywords with only a few direct competitors.
4. Bing is SEO-Friendly
While SEO on Google feels like a battle against the updates, Bing is more friendly towards SEO. They’re more transparent about their ranking factors and offer a more helpful suite of tools to check how well your website meets their guidelines for ranking.
You can inspect individual URLs to check how they’re doing on Bing using their URL Inspection Tool. This is going to give you real, actionable information to help you improve your rankings on Bing search results pages.
Bing Webmaster Tools also help you check your site performance, claim your pages more easily, analyze traffic, and gain access to helpful Bing SEO tools to continually improve.
Because websites can be registered with different search engines simultaneously, you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up for these free Bing tools. You can learn a lot about what’s working and what’s not, tweaking your site to get higher on the rankings over time.
5. If You’re Already Doing SEO, Bing SEO is Easy
While Bing SEO isn’t exactly the same as Google SEO, it’s very similar. With a few small tweaks and monitoring your Bing rankings, you can bring in a lot of new traffic from Bing without fundamentally changing your content.
While the algorithms for Bing and Google weigh their ranking factors differently, the difference isn’t so huge.
For example, Bing puts a lot more weight on social metrics like user engagement and social media interactions. They also focus on page authority, meaning newer websites can find it difficult to rank on Bing right away.
Related: How to Leverage Reddit in Your SEO Strategy
These are just a few of the differences. There are more things that separate SEO on Google versus Bing, but nothing about Bing SEO is out of reach if you’re already paying attention to ranking and optimization on your site.
Why limit yourself to only one search platform for SEO? Start going after Bing rankings and watch your traffic slowly climb and diversify.
