Bing is a popular search engine that is owned by Microsoft. Marketers should always optimize their sites for Bing, as they also power Yahoo’s results, and less tech-savvy windows users often use them as it is the default setting on their machine. 

While Google & its subsidiaries have the highest search traffic volume, Bing is the second most used engine, and optimizing your site for Bing powers Yahoo optimizations too.

Optimizing Your Website For Bing Search

While traditional metrics such as Page Load Speed, mobile-friendliness & international targeting are all the same as Google, there are some differences between the two engines.

Bing also relies on backlinks, using them like Google to signal votes of confidence or authority.

Bing however places more importance on the age of the domains that link to your site, in addition to the traditional favorites for .gov, .edu etc… backlink rules.

When optimizing for queries, Bing also has a slightly different approach, similar to an old approach you might take to optimize content for Google many years ago.

Exact match content is favored more in Bing, both in domains & URLs, as well as in your primary heading tags.

This makes having the best quality content even more important.

Content structure & information architecture also must be properly implemented, as Bing tends to place more importance on these signals than Google does (Google doesn’t ignore them, but they have many other ranking factors at play than Bing.)

Bing will also reportedly favor websites that have better levels of Social Media engagement, viewing it as a sign of trust.

This makes having a strong social media presence an important part of your optimization process.