3 Key Differences Between Bing SEO and Google SEO

Within the last few years, Bing has continued gaining traction, comfortably holding the second position in 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.

Bing SEO vs. Google SEO: Key Differentiators

1. Keywords

Keywords are essential to any solid organic search strategy for your text-based content. 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 understand your page better 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 its 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. Bing vs Google Backlinks

Both Bing and Google value backlinks and consider them a positive signal for domain authority. However, there are a few differences in how the platforms 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.

4. Multimedia Content

Multimedia content includes any type of data or information that can be transmitted, stored, and manipulated in a form other than pure text. This includes audio, video, and image files. For consumers, multimedia content presents an opportunity to communicate with a website’s visitors in a visually appealing way. Instead of users having to read through long blocks of text, consumers can simply view video content that explains the same concepts in much less time.

Adding multimedia content to your website also has numerous SEO benefits due to its ability to keep viewers engaged and subscribed for longer amounts of time. While Google does index multimedia content for certain searches, they are not as heavily weighted as factors such as keyword density and link patterns when it comes to ranking on their search engine. However, Bing rewards companies that integrate multimedia into their web pages with higher search rankings because they place more emphasis on media-rich sites over those without any visuals at all. Including video in your marketing strategy is a great idea for both Bing and Google search queries.

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 search engine optimization experts, we have the skills and knowledge to drive the right organic traffic to your website.