How to use Bing Webmaster Tools for higher rankings

While you can’t deny that when it comes to search engines Google stands head and shoulders above its competitors, Bing can still bring relevant traffic and customers to your website. Not only does Bing power search results for Yahoo, but it also is the default search engine in Windows 10 and Internet Explorer, which means that plenty of people will use it on a daily basis. In this article, we’ll take a look at how using Bing Webmaster Tools can help give you the tools you need for better rankings in Bing.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is exactly what it sounds like – a selection of tools that can help you understand how your website is performing in the search engine. With a whole host of features, Bing Webmaster Tools offers some great free tools that can help you gauge the performance of your website and make changes to help you get higher rankings.

Top features that you should be using

There are plenty of reasons for using Bing Webmaster Tools with one of the most compelling being the range of tools and features available for website owners. Some of these features you won’t find in Google’s Search Console either, so they are well worth taking a look at.

Backlink audit

While Google Search Console will tell you about the backlinks to your own website, in Bing Webmaster Tools you can compare your backlinks with those of your competitors. This is a great tool for anyone looking for a top-level analysis and insights into the backlink profiles of similar businesses in their industry.

Site scan

Want to know if your website has onsite problems that need addressing? The site scan tool lets you quickly and easily scan your website and analyse potential problems which are then categorised into 4 sections which are: all issues, errors, warnings and notices.

Errors – these are the most important elements that should be fixed, examples of these include a missing meta description tag, missing title tag or page being blocked.

Warnings – slightly lower down the scale of importance are warnings which cover everything from title tags being too long to missing alt attributes on images.

Notices – last on the list of priorities are notices which ten to focus on less important issues such as more than 1 heading tag on a page or a missing heading tag.

With a page limit of 1000 pages, the free Site Scan tool provides an on-demand crawl of your website pages to check for common technical issues that can affect your SEO and your website rankings.

SEO reports

Want actionable page-level recommendations to improve your SEO? Simply head to the SEO reports section which focuses on a set of approximately 15 SEO best practices that can help you improve the ranking potential of your website.

Search performance

This section is very similar to Google’s and lets webmasters see how much traffic is coming to their sites from Bing and also details such as clicks, impressions, keywords and pages. You also get access to the overall trend of traffic for the last 6 months including a list of all search keywords that were used to find your website.

One of the best uses of the search performance reporting is to highlight pages and keywords that are outside the first page of search results which would be worth targeting to generate more traffic. While this section is useful it shouldn’t be considered as an alternative to your standard analytics software which will provide a much more detailed view and show website traffic from all sources.

Keyword research tool

Looking for opportunities to get more traffic to your website? Then you’ll love Bing’s native keyword research tool. When you choose a keyword you’ll get a whole host of data that you’d normally only find in premium SEO tools including: impressions, top countries for chosen keyword, related keywords, question keywords, newly discovered related keywords and top 10 ranking websites for the chosen keyword.

The ability to see which websites are ranking for a keyword can help you determine whether these are a good match for your business or if they are extremely competitive terms where you would struggle to rank well. Simple checks like this can help save you time and money and let you focus on the keyword phrases that will have the biggest impact on your business.

Conclusion

If you are looking to get the most traffic possible to your website, then optimising for Bing will help to give your website rankings and traffic a boost. With less search competition as more businesses focus entirely on Google, you’ll also see quicker results. And, generally speaking most changes that Bing recommends you making will also have a positive impact on your rankings in other search engines, including Google.