SEO for Bing (and Yahoo): A Quick Guide
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 8:30 am
Creativemotions»SEO & Marketing»SEO for Bing (and Yahoo): A Quick Guide
seo bing and yahoo
When we talk about SEO , we don’t talk much about Bing as we spend a lot of time worrying about Google and making sure we optimize our websites for their algorithms. (For the purpose of this article, Bing also refers to Yahoo as Yahoo is also powered by Bing, so it works very similarly)
At Creativemotions, we tend to focus our efforts on Google rather than Bing for 2 reasons:
Google dominates the search engine landscape with 88% of the global market share , which means that the majority of our clients' traffic comes from Google.
Google is the most advanced of all search engines, which uae phone number data that generally if you are well optimized for Google, you are probably well optimized for Bing as well.
So does this mean we should ignore the idea of doing SEO for Yahoo and Bing altogether ?
This largely depends on your situation, but we should also be aware that the ranking criteria on Yahoo and Bing are different and could make a difference.
Should I optimize my site for Bing (and Yahoo)?
You need to optimize your site for Bing rankings if:
Your site operates in the United States. In the United States, Bing (and Yahoo) have a market share of 36% , which means that over a third of all visitors to your site come from Bing or Yahoo. Bing also has a significant presence in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Hong Kong, France, and Norway.
If you get significant amounts of traffic from Bing and Yahoo (just check in Google Analytics under “All Traffic”, then “Source/Medium”).
Your target audience tends to be “older.” Older users tend to use Bing more than younger users.
If your site meets any of these criteria, you probably need to think at least a little about Bing and optimize your site for this search engine.
How to Optimize for Bing (and Yahoo)
Below, we list the main points where Bing and Google differ to customize your SEO strategy for Bing.
Social Media – Google does not use social media signals in their rankings while Bing does, which means a strong social media strategy can help improve your Bing rankings.
Non-text content – Bing appears to be better equipped to understand non-text content such as images, video, audio, and even flash, increasing the likelihood of rewarding such content if it is high quality. However, we advise caution because while Bing may understand multimedia content better, creating content of this type could hurt your Google rankings, so a measured approach to media is recommended.
Local – In local search, Bing places a greater emphasis on proximity, while Google places a greater emphasis on brand. Therefore, small businesses are more likely to gain visibility in Bing local search than Google. This makes a Bing-focused strategy potentially more important for smaller brands with a local presence; claiming and updating your Bing Places profile is a good place to start.
Keywords – Bing rewards exact match keywords more than Google, which is better at determining the sentiment behind keyword usage. This means that if you want to improve your Bing rankings, you need to make sure that your metadata, page content, and meta keywords use accurate, relevant, and high-volume keywords.
Meta Keywords – Google hasn’t used the meta keywords tag for years, while Bing still does so it’s worth updating with relevant keywords if your traffic from Bing is significant.
Canonical Tags – Bing finds it more difficult to determine the canonical version of a page than Google, making the use of canonical tags more important.
Links – Bing places more emphasis on links from highly trusted domains, especially if those domains have .gov, .edu, or .org extensions. Receiving links from these types of sites will give you a greater advantage on Bing.
Crawling – Bing tends to crawl pages less frequently and tends to focus on a smaller, more important set of pages, which means that submitting pages to Bing Webmaster Tools can be an important strategy for getting new content indexed and ranked more quickly.
seo bing and yahoo
When we talk about SEO , we don’t talk much about Bing as we spend a lot of time worrying about Google and making sure we optimize our websites for their algorithms. (For the purpose of this article, Bing also refers to Yahoo as Yahoo is also powered by Bing, so it works very similarly)
At Creativemotions, we tend to focus our efforts on Google rather than Bing for 2 reasons:
Google dominates the search engine landscape with 88% of the global market share , which means that the majority of our clients' traffic comes from Google.
Google is the most advanced of all search engines, which uae phone number data that generally if you are well optimized for Google, you are probably well optimized for Bing as well.
So does this mean we should ignore the idea of doing SEO for Yahoo and Bing altogether ?
This largely depends on your situation, but we should also be aware that the ranking criteria on Yahoo and Bing are different and could make a difference.
Should I optimize my site for Bing (and Yahoo)?
You need to optimize your site for Bing rankings if:
Your site operates in the United States. In the United States, Bing (and Yahoo) have a market share of 36% , which means that over a third of all visitors to your site come from Bing or Yahoo. Bing also has a significant presence in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Hong Kong, France, and Norway.
If you get significant amounts of traffic from Bing and Yahoo (just check in Google Analytics under “All Traffic”, then “Source/Medium”).
Your target audience tends to be “older.” Older users tend to use Bing more than younger users.
If your site meets any of these criteria, you probably need to think at least a little about Bing and optimize your site for this search engine.
How to Optimize for Bing (and Yahoo)
Below, we list the main points where Bing and Google differ to customize your SEO strategy for Bing.
Social Media – Google does not use social media signals in their rankings while Bing does, which means a strong social media strategy can help improve your Bing rankings.
Non-text content – Bing appears to be better equipped to understand non-text content such as images, video, audio, and even flash, increasing the likelihood of rewarding such content if it is high quality. However, we advise caution because while Bing may understand multimedia content better, creating content of this type could hurt your Google rankings, so a measured approach to media is recommended.
Local – In local search, Bing places a greater emphasis on proximity, while Google places a greater emphasis on brand. Therefore, small businesses are more likely to gain visibility in Bing local search than Google. This makes a Bing-focused strategy potentially more important for smaller brands with a local presence; claiming and updating your Bing Places profile is a good place to start.
Keywords – Bing rewards exact match keywords more than Google, which is better at determining the sentiment behind keyword usage. This means that if you want to improve your Bing rankings, you need to make sure that your metadata, page content, and meta keywords use accurate, relevant, and high-volume keywords.
Meta Keywords – Google hasn’t used the meta keywords tag for years, while Bing still does so it’s worth updating with relevant keywords if your traffic from Bing is significant.
Canonical Tags – Bing finds it more difficult to determine the canonical version of a page than Google, making the use of canonical tags more important.
Links – Bing places more emphasis on links from highly trusted domains, especially if those domains have .gov, .edu, or .org extensions. Receiving links from these types of sites will give you a greater advantage on Bing.
Crawling – Bing tends to crawl pages less frequently and tends to focus on a smaller, more important set of pages, which means that submitting pages to Bing Webmaster Tools can be an important strategy for getting new content indexed and ranked more quickly.