Differences Between Ranking in Google and Bing

When marketers talk about SEO, their focus is almost always on Google’s search engine. There is a good reason for this. Google accounts for more than 85% of all online web searches, while Bing comes in around 7%, meaning that the majority of your customers will be reaching your site via Google.

But 7% of Bing searchers is still significant and considering the different demographic that uses Bing, many of your potential customers might come from that search engine. This makes it worthwhile to understand how the two search engines differ and what strategies you can use to keep your website at the top of search results on both. 

Which Users Search on Bing

Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, so it is the default search engine on Microsoft products, including PCs and Xboxes. It is also the default search engine for Amazon Alexa searches and the Cortana assistant. Bing also provides the framework for searches through a number of other companies, including Yahoo MSN, AOL, and DuckDuckGo. 

These platforms contribute to the average age of a Bing user being older than that of a Google user, which also often means that those using Bing have more money to spend on products and services, making it valuable to rank well on both search engines. 

How to Improve Your Bing Search Result Ranking

The good news is that both Google and Bing use very similar algorithms for their search results. If you have already been focusing on what you need to rank well in Google, SEO for Bing will not be a significant challenge. In fact, your website may already show up at the top of Bing searches.

If you notice a significant difference between your Google and Bing results, here are some strategies you can use to make your site more attractive to the Bing search engine:

  • Specify Keywords – Keywords remain important in Bing searches as they do with Google. However, Bing is still catching up in terms of understanding implicit and related search results. This means that it still gives higher weight to exact keyword matches. For this reason, you want to be sure that you are using the keywords you expect your site visitors to search throughout your content, although without ever keyword stuffing as this practice will hurt you with both Google and Bing.
  • Social Media – Bing puts significant weight on your social media influence, unlike Google. If you have significant engagement on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other relevant social media, your site will also rank better in a Bing search.
  • Backlinks – Both Google and Bing like backlinks, but Bing prefers to see a small number of very high quality links. Bing also likes internal links that connect various pages on your website.
  • Visual Content – Bing has long led indexing of visual content like photos and videos, surpassing Google which prefers more text based sites. This makes it important to have high quality photos and videos on your site that are optimized for fast load times on the web.
  • Website Crawling and Indexing – Google has the resources to frequently crawl and index web pages, identifying your website changes earlier and putting them into effect in terms of your SEO ranking sooner. Bing’s automatic crawling tends to be more infrequent, so it can be useful after any major changes to your site to submit a sitemap to Bing or to bulk request that Bing reindex any changed pages.

The one primary thing that both of these search engines have in common is that they look for high quality content. Both want to provide a good experience for their users by sending them to websites that will have valuable information. For this reason, it is important to continuously add informative, new content to your website.

Great Leap Studios can assist you in creating optimized content for both Google and Bing to help your small business website stand out to customers wherever they are searching for you. Learn more about our content marketing strategies and how they can help your business when you contact us.

Author

  • Micah Abraham

    Micah Abraham is the owner and lead content writer at Great Leap Studios (https://GreatLeapStudios.com) and High Volt Digital (https://HighVoltDigital.com).
    Micah has over 15 years of content writing and digital marketing experience, and has owned and operated Great Leap Studios since 2013 and High Volt since 2022.
    He has a degree in Psychology from the University of Washington, and has researched and written content on a wide range of topics in the medical and health fields, home services, tech, and beyond.
    Micah lives with his family in California.

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