Within the last few years, Bing has continued gaining traction, comfortably holding the second position of the search engine market, behind its leader, Google. Ensuring your website is optimized is the safest way to ensure your site can be found by your potential customers, no matter what search engine they’re using.
While Bing and Google share many of the same SEO and ranking factors, there are a few key differences you should be aware of. Keep reading to find out what they are.
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Bing SEO vs. Google SEO: Key Differentiators
1. Keywords
Keywords are essential to any solid organic search strategy. But, you should know that there are a few differences between how Google and Bing understand keywords.
Google employs what is known as semantic search to improve the accuracy of understanding a searcher’s intent. This has given Google the ability to not only examine keywords but also understand keyword context.
When optimizing your site for Google, ensuring each article or page uses exact match keywords won’t make or break your chances of ranking. Instead, Google prefers SEOs create comprehensive pages backed by relevant keyword research, this allows SEOs to focus on topical relevance instead of exact match keywords. Google can then use its semantic ingenuity to better understand your page and help it rank for an exact match keyword as well as other variants of the keyword.
On the other hand, Bing struggles to contextualize keywords and their Webmaster Guidelines advise using precise, targeted keywords whenever possible. This suggests that you may find that you rank higher in Bing SERPs when you use straightforward keywords that exactly match the terms you’re targeting in Bing’s search results.
2. Backlinks
Both Bing and Google value backlinks, but there are a few differences in how the two judge link quality.
When it comes to backlinks, Google always prefers quality over quantity. Fewer high-quality links are worth significantly more than hundreds of spammy, poor-quality links. Google ranks websites with authoritative backlinks and high-quality content. To Google, these indicators prove that your site is a trustworthy and quality resource, worthy of citation.
Bing also values high-quality links, but the way they judge quality is a little different from Google. Bing places a lot of emphasis on domain age. If you earn links from well-established domains that have existed for quite some time, you’re likely to rank high on Bing.
Bing also likes to see backlinks with domain extensions like .gov, .edu, and .org. Bing considers these domain extensions to be high trust signals.
Some even argue that Bing places more emphasis on the number of backlinks you receive as compared to Google. While this may hold some truth, I’d recommend always focusing your link building strategy on obtaining quality links and not succumbing to the idea of building as many links as possible.
3. Social Media Signals
Despite a lot of speculation, Google denies that social signals play any sort of role in page ranking.
Bing, however, places a ton of importance on social signals. Bing considers sites that are mentioned on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook as more valuable and relevant for ranking on its SERP. The more likes, shares, recommendations, etc. your website has on a social media platform, the better chance you have to rank on Bing.
The Secret to SEO Success
Whether Bing or Google, ensuring your website is fully optimized is key to your success in search. Implementing a strong, quality SEO strategy is not only beneficial to a brand and its marketing efforts, but it is critical to its web presence.
Need some help? If you’re looking to boost your search engine rankings, contact SMA Marketing today! As digital marketing and SEO experts, we have the skills and knowledge to drive the right organic traffic to your website.
