How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website in 2019

By: Greg Kristan

In 2018, Bing Drove 30% of Organic Traffic to TM Blast

By Device Breakdown

• The majority of my overall organic traffic comes from desktop search which Bing makes up around ~20%

• This percentage makeup is similar to what GS statcounter calculates for Bing desktop traffic in the U.S. See next slide

Search Engine Market Share in the U.S for

Desktop Search

GS Statcounter is my trusted search engine market share calculator. Their tool says if you combine Bing, Yahoo, and MSN, they have seen Bing cover 15% of the search engine share

You should use this number as a baseline for your website via desktop market share.

Bing Ads numbers on the bottom right are interesting, but don’t believe the 33% number as that is misleading

Where Is Bing On the Web?

Bing’s Footprint in Windows 10

• Bing is a critical component in Windows 10 devices. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge (new browser), Internet Explorer, and Cortana.

• Bing is also built into Office 365 applications like Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote to name a few services.

Bing Is In More Places Than You Thinkhttps://www.slideshare.net/SamiaKesseiri/microsoft-bing-ads-product-overview?from_action=save

Bing has Many Search Dealshttps://www.slideshare.net/bingads/bing-audience-and-syndication-the-power-of-bing-audience-and-its-syndication-network-get-insights-into-

bing-ads-strategy

So How Should I Optimize My Site for Bing?

5 Key Optimizations + Case Studies

BING WEBMASTER TOOLS

BING ADS INTELLIGENCE

LOG FILE ANALYSIS BING PLACES FOR BUSINESS

STANDARD SEO OPTIMIZATION

TACTICS

CASE STUDIES

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools

• Crawl Error Report

• Crawl Control

• Submit XML Sitemap

• Ignore URL Parameters

• SEO Reports

• Manually Fetch Key Pages by Bing

• Geotargeting

• KW Position and CTR% Report

• Disavow Bad Links

Bing Webmaster Tools: Crawl Error

Report

• Bing has a unique crawl error report in their dashboard that illustrates what type of errors their bot has encountered when visiting your site

• Cleaning up 404 errors may not seem like a big deal in SEO, but giving Bing (and Google) URL’s that should be seen by bots and people can make a difference

• On TM Blast, I work to have a report that reads like this to the right. You can see no errors which means Bing has a clean crawl on my site

Bing Webmaster Tools: Crawl Control

• Crawl control is your way to limit how often Bing crawls your website.

• The middle of the day is when my site receives most of it’s traffic, so I tell Bing not to crawl my site during that time.

• The thought process of this is that I don’t want Bing to make my load time longer when my audience is coming to TM Blast.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Submit a

Sitemap

• XML sitemaps are something that Bing looks at when visiting websites.

• Bing has specifically stated that they do not like XML sitemaps that have “Dirt” in them. Dirty sitemaps are XML files that have 404, 302, 301, and 500 status codes in them, so get rid of them!

Bing Webmaster Tools: SEO Report

Checklist

• Bing has a SEO report that they run every two weeks for your domain. These reports may uncover hidden opportunities like areas that Bing is having a hard time seeing when they come to your site

• Check this report every two weeks to see if any new errors are present on the domain.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Ignore URL

Parameters

• Don’t overlook this section within Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing’s bot at times can run wild on domains and crawl all sorts of URL’s.

• To prevent Bing from crawling and wasting their time on sections that don’t matter via SEO, you should manually block them in Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools: Manually Submitting

Bing to Crawl Specefic Pages

• Bing has a feature like Google Search Console where you can manually fetch pages via Bing bot for crawling.

• Bing may be slower to see new content when you compare it to Google, so get in the habit of fetching pages as Bing to get faster rankings in their search engine.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Geo-Targeting

• If your website and or business has one primary location, you should specify that to Bing.

• Use the Geo-Targeting tool in the dashboard to let their bot know your location preference.

Bing Webmaster Tools: KW Position and

CTR% Report

• Having the ability to visualize the difference in CTR (click-through rate) when achieving a better position on Bing can be huge in SEO.

• You can use this report when forecasting how much additional traffic from Bing you are able to get if you achieve a better KW ranking.

Bing Webmaster Tools: Disavow Links

• Links from external sources play as a ranking factor for Bing just like Google. Bad links from bad places can demote your site in Bing’s view.

• You should audit your backlink profile in a tool like SEMRush and disavow URL’s or domains that you don’t want Bing to consider when ranking your website.

Bing Ads Intelligence

Bing Ads Intelligence: Keyword Expansion

• Using Excel, you can conduct Bing keyword research in the matter of seconds.

• This example to the right expands on the root term “SEO Expert” and gives me additional keywords to consider as well.

Bing Ads Intelligence: Expanding on

Keywords

• Taking the example from before, I can see additional benchmarks that can help assist me in my strategy.

• Seeing what the average bid advertisers bid money on can tell me the value of achieving a certain rank position in Bing for myself or a client.

Bing Ads Intelligence: Custom Macro

Reports

• Bing Ads Intelligence comes pre-built with macro Excel worksheets to help assist you in keyword opportunities

• Choose from many templates to uncover new keywords to work on that people search for on Bing

Log File Analysis

Log File Analysis:

• Running log file analysis can tell you how often Bingbot is accessing your critical pages on your site

• If you notice certain pages are not driving much traffic as you like, you should review the logs to see if Bing is crawling the pages or not.

Bing Places for Business

Bing Places for Business: Dashboard

• Get your business located on Bing places for business if you have not already

• Having your listing properly listed with pictures, phone number, website, etc. will help you appear more often in Bing Maps

Bing Places for Business: Stats

• Keep a pulse on your profile by seeing how your listing compares to markets near you

• Consider updating the account with new pictures, hours, and more to have the freshness factor come into play with Bing.

Bing Places for Business: Non Brand

Keyword Searches

• By filling out a profile on Bing places for business, you can help grow your presence for non-brand keywords when searches search in maps.

• My listing is the second listing which directly takes the information from Bing places for business.

Bing Places for Business: Example of a

Ranking Page

• A brand search for my name yields a knowledge graph box on the right hand side of the SERP

• These results come directly from Bing places of business, so get your business listed on here to get this knowledge graph!

Standard SEO Optimization Tactics

Title TagKeywords in URL

Header Tags withKeywords

Rich ALT tag SEOImages for Bing

Standard On Page SEO

• Bing uses a plethora of ranking signals for their results. Utilizing title tags, URL’s, meta name descriptions, header tags, image ALT tags, semantic keywords on the page, and more will help drive results

Standard On Page SEO

Bing, some can argue, does a better job showcasing image results than Google

As a tip, you should save your image file name as an SEO friendly title along with an SEO friendly ALT tag

Case Study: 2 Current Clients

Case Study: 24% of Bing’s crawl results in

Error Fix

• Bing gives SEO reports every two weeks for your website. Here is an example of a notice I received that told me that Bing basically a quarter of the time came across errors when visiting my site

• From a technical perspective, we were losing out on 24% cleaner pages via a crawl since Bing was wasting their time getting to 404 and 500 errors.

Case Study: Query Parameters Causing Duplicate Content

• Query Parameters can cause major problems for Bingbot when trying to rank your website. If Bing see’s multiple versions of a URL (and other elements are not clear like canonical tags), you can run into duplicate content and thus not rank well in Bing.

Case Study: Removing Errors that Bing Came

Across

• This picture to the right illustrates the amount of crawl errors Bing encountered when crawling the website.

• By using the crawl report, I was able to see what URL’s were 404’s and 500 I created proper 301 redirects to reduce crawl errors on the site.

Case Study: Removing Unnecessary Pages in

Bing’s Index

• Bing was wasting their time crawling unnecessary pages like UTM URL's, query parameters, and other facet URL’s.

• Using the ignore URL parameter sections, I was able to reduce unnecessary bloat for this domain to help Bing’s crawl control

Case Study: Keyword Ranking

Improvements

• By using Bing Webmaster Tools and address technical errors, I was able to improve every target keyword for my account. Many terms improved to page 1 in Bing from technical work

• SEO takes time, so I encourage you to track your performance to spot trends like this

Final Recommendations

Bing does not use HREFLang for different language / country specifications, so you will need to use Meta Lang Content tags

Bing has difficulty with JavaScript, so make sure you are serving important content in an HTML format. If you are unable to do this, you should look into JavaScript rendering for Bing specifically

Bing can use Meta Keywords as a spam indicator, so don’t use this tags to mass copy and paste the words on every page.

Use the site:domain command in Bing to see what URL’s are in Bing’s index. You should compare this number to Google to see if there are any URL’s that are in Google that should be in Bing, but are not.