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written by Derrick English Jr.
You will be surprised to hear how many companies are not using Bing Webmaster Tools as a secondary source for increasing organic web traffic. You may state that is because Google has the majority of the search engine market, which is true. However, like any top company you will have competitors who also want a piece of the pie and Bing Webmaster Tools is a powerful service that is taking the necessary steps to get a big slice.
Microsoft is making all the right moves to grow Bing
1) Yahoo and AOL
Did you know that Bing powers Yahoo’s and AOL’s organic search results? A comScore qSearch™ analysis of the U.S. desktop search marketplace in February 2016 showed that Bing Sites powered 21.4%, Yahoo Sites powered 12.2% and AOL, Inc. powered 0.9%. If you add those number up, Bing powered 34.5% of the market.
2) Email service provider
Next, think about the first email address that you had, it probably was a Hotmail or Yahoo account. I currently use my first email account from Yahoo as my junkbox when I purchase online at e-commerce store or travel sites because I do not want a large number of e-newsletters going to my professional email account. However, when I do use my Yahoo email account, I receive ads that I click on and use the search box to make product comparisons and other searches instead of opening a new web browser to search in Google. A 2012 report from Digital Strategy Consulting showed statistics of the popularity of Hotmail with Europeans, and it is still a majority of Europeans’ primary email account. So I can assume Europeans are using the search box in their email account as well, which is powered by Bing.
3) LinkedIn
Even if Bing only accounts for a third of the search engine results, would you be willing to lose that much organic traffic, which can lead to another source of revenue? I would assume not. Also with the news of Microsoft acquiring Linkedin, the integration of Bing into Linkedin’s search will soon be used by the 433 million Linkedin users. Another plus why you should use the services offered by Bing Webmaster Tools.
Which Bing Webmaster Tools to use
Bing Webmaster Tools has many features, tools and reports that Google Search Console also has. However, it includes others that were first presented by Bing before Google implemented such as ‘Disavow Links’. Here are the first seven tools and a short description from Bing that you should begin to use:
1. Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Bing about URLs on your site that would be otherwise hard to discover by their web crawler.
2. Submit URLs
Submitting a URL from your website can be an important first step to being indexed. This method is designed to allow web publishers to quickly alert Bing that their new site exists.
3. Disavow Links
You can use the Disavow Links tool to submit page, directory, or domain URLs that may contain links to your site that seem “unnatural” or appear to be from spam or low quality sites.
4. Malware
If your site has pages that contain harmful elements infected by malware, Bing will provide you with a sample set of links for which their scans detected issues with, which you should resolve.
5. Reports & Data
Provides you with a quick overview of site activity and other sources of data nicely lined up on a single page for quick access. Bing provides even more convenience by including Yahoo data in the reports as well.
6. Keyword Research
This tool uses organic keyword volume data from Bing to help webmasters understand the relative popularity of terms.
7. SEO Analyzer
Will scan any URL you enter from one of your verified domains and build a report to let you know if the page scanned is in or out of compliance with each of these SEO best practices.
Conclusion
Organic traffic is free and will always be the most valuable search traffic in the world. So it would be in your best interest to make sure your SEO strategy includes utilizing Bing. Bing services account for over 30% of search engine results, and depending on your targeted audience and their behavior, why would you miss out on driving increased traffic to your website if your audience uses Hotmail (MS Outlook), Yahoo, AOL or LinkedIn.
How do you plan getting the most out of using Bing Webmaster Tools to drive increase traffic? We look forward to hearing your metrics on how Bing has helped out your company.
