Updates for the week ending April 1, 2022
No fooling: we think you can use Bing to rank in Google. We believe this so strongly that we updated several of our processes, this week.
In case you don’t believe me, here’s a link to the Office Hours video (from a couple weeks ago) where I walk through all the valuable information Bing Webmaster Tools has to offer. This week, I took some time to improve several processes in light of this wonderful, free tool.
The key here is that, even if you don’t care about Bing, you can use the data from Bing Webmaster Tools to help you perform better in Google. Here are a couple ways this can help.
For one, Bing Webmaster Tools provides an SEO Report. In this, it recommends several ways you can improve your particular website in light of SEO best-practices. I’ve consolidated all these recommendations in one place and added some insight from my experience: sharing whether the issue that Bing identifies is truly as important as they say and whether or not Google agrees with Bing about this SEO problem. I recommend you check this once a week, as part of your weekly technical SEO audit.
The weekly audit isn’t only about catching the recommendations in the SEO report. Take time to review your Site Structure, too, to uncover potential problems. Also, you might want to run their Site Scanner, now and then. It’s no Screaming Frog, but it can still give you a lot of great insights.
Another thing Bing Webmaster Tools can do for you is provide data to associate with your keywords during your keyword research. Anyone who has tried to do keyword research can find an unlimited list of possible words for which you might want to “rank.” The problem is: is anyone else looking for that phrase? That’s why it’s an important part of any keyword research process to collect data on keywords. Bing Webmaster Tools gives away keyword data for free.
Another part of Bing Webmaster Tools, that is normally found in expensive SEO tools, is a back link analysis tool. Now Google Search Console does show you some of the websites linking to you- and Bing is not much different. However Bing will allow you to compare your back links against your competitors, helping provide some great competitive back link data from which you might be able to find additional link opportunities.
All these SEO tactics are great but won’t help you unless they produce more customers. Don’t overlook Microsoft Clarity. It’s a way to watch people as they view your website. It’s a great way to improve your conversion rates.