How to Use Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO

To use Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO, start by leveraging the Bing Keyword Planner to discover new keywords and analyse their search volumes, ensuring you target terms that align with your audience’s search intent. Brainstorm potential terms relevant to your business and utilise related searches at the bottom of Bing search results for additional ideas. Access Bing Keyword Planner via Microsoft Ads to search for new keywords and analyse competitor keywords. Use the tools to track keyword performance, including impressions and clicks, and adjust your content strategy based on these metrics. Optimise on-page elements like header tags, meta descriptions, and URL structure, and utilise the Site Scan feature to identify and fix technical issues. By monitoring crawl stats, URL indexing, and backlink profiles, you can enhance your site’s visibility and health, and if you continue, you’ll uncover more insights to boost your SEO strategy.

Key Takeaways

  • Keyword Research and Analysis: Use Bing Keyword Planner via Microsoft Ads to find new keywords, analyse search volume, and track competitor keywords to identify relevant targets.
  • Tracking and Performance Metrics: Utilise the Search Keywords report to track impressions, clicks, CTR, and average click positions, and adjust content strategy based on these metrics.
  • On-Page and Technical SEO: Optimise on-page elements like header tags, meta descriptions, and URL structure, and use the Site Scan feature to identify and fix technical issues.
  • URL Management and Indexing: Use the URL Inspection tool to check indexing status, request indexing for updated pages, and analyse crawl stats to ensure proper site indexing.
  • Backlink Analysis and Competitor Insights: Analyse backlink profiles using Bing Webmaster Tools, compare with competitors, and identify gaps and opportunities to enhance link-building strategies.

Discovering New Keywords

When it comes to discovering new keywords using Bing Webmaster Tools, the process begins with a thorough brainstorming session. Start by listing potential keywords relevant to your business or niche, putting yourself in your target audience’s shoes to think of what they might search for. Consider the products or services you offer and the language and location of your target audience. Use related searches at the bottom of Bing search results pages to gather more keyword ideas and shortlist keywords that your competitors are ranking for, focusing on those that are most relevant to your business.

Next, access the Bing Keyword Planner through the Microsoft Ads page by signing in or creating a Microsoft account. Use the “Search for new keywords” option to enter your root keywords or the URL of a relevant landing page. Enter keywords separated by commas and apply filters such as country, language, and time frame. Review the suggested keywords and their related data to identify potential targets.

Analyse these suggestions to find keywords that align with your business’s offerings and target audience. Filter suggestions based on relevance, search trends, and user demographics to discover untapped keywords that may not be immediately obvious. This approach, combined with competitor analysis, will help you refine your keyword strategy and improve your overall SEO. By using data from Bing Webmaster Tools, you can validate keyword relevance and ensure you are not optimising pages for un-searched keywords.

This approach, combined with competitor analysis, will help you refine your keyword strategy and improve your overall SEO.

Analysing Search Volumes

To effectively analyse search volumes using Bing Webmaster Tools, you need to understand the unique metrics it provides. The Keyword Research tool in Bing Webmaster Tools offers valuable data on keyword impressions, which indicate the number of times a keyword was seen in Bing search results. This data is provided for an undisclosed amount of time, differing from Google Keyword Planner’s average search volume.

Here are key points to evaluate when analysing search volumes:

  1. Impressions vs. Search Volume: Bing’s impressions are distinct from Google’s average search volume. Impressions show how many times a keyword appeared in search results, while Google’s metric shows the average number of searches per month.
  2. Data Consistency: Avoid comparing metrics from different sources; instead, use one source consistently for your keyword research to maintain data integrity.
  3. Coverage of Less Common Keywords: Bing’s smaller audience means it may not have data on less common keywords that Google might cover.

Using Bing’s data, you can analyse keyword trends and search behaviour to differentiate and prioritise keywords based on actual search volume. This helps you focus on keywords that have a higher likelihood of being searched, avoiding guesswork in SEO optimisation. By integrating this data into your SEO strategies, you can improve your website’s traffic and customer engagement. Additionally, you can estimate total organic search volume by combining Bing data with market share statistics, allowing you to extrapolate total search volume across the entire search market.

Understanding Keyword Demographics

After analysing search volumes to understand the frequency and impact of your keywords, the next step is to gain a deeper understanding of the people behind those searches. This involves delving into keyword demographics to tailor your content and SEO strategies more effectively.

Gaining Insights into User Age and Gender

Understanding the age and gender of users searching for specific keywords is essential. Tools like Google Analytics and Demographics.io provide valuable data on these demographics. This information helps you target content to specific age and gender groups, creating age and gender-specific content strategies that enhance the relevance of your content to the targeted demographic. Utilising Bing Webmaster Tools can also provide unique audience insights, particularly into the older demographic with higher income levels and intent to purchase, Bing-specific audience.

Analysing User Location

Analysing the geographical locations of users searching for keywords offers insights into regional search patterns and preferences. Google Trends and tools like KWFinder help you identify where your audience is located, allowing you to customise content based on regional demographics. This approach improves local SEO by aligning your content with regional search behaviors.

Tailoring Content to Unique Audience Segments

By understanding user behavior and audience segmentation, you can develop content that resonates with specific demographic groups. This involves identifying unique queries and preferences of your audience, enabling a deeper connection with them. Tailoring your content in this way enhances user experience and visibility by aligning it with the needs of your target audience.

Integrating Demographic Insights into SEO Strategies

Integrating demographic insights into your SEO strategies provides actionable insights to guide your content strategy and keyword targeting. This helps refine your SEO strategies to match the nuances of your audience, facilitating competitive analysis and continuous monitoring of high-value keywords. By making data-driven decisions, you can optimise and improve your SEO performance markedly.

Tracking Keyword Performance

Tracking keyword performance is an essential step in refining your SEO strategy, and Bing Webmaster Tools provides the necessary tools to do this effectively.

Using the Keyword Research tool in Bing Webmaster Tools, you can discover and analyse keywords that are driving traffic to your site. This tool offers valuable data on keyword impressions, indicating how many people saw the keyword in Bing search results. Here are some key metrics you can track:

  • Impressions and Clicks: See how many times your keywords appeared in search results and how many clicks they generated.
  • Click-Through Rates (CTR) and Average Click Positions: Understand the effectiveness of your keywords with CTR and average click position metrics.
  • Average Appearance Position: Get an overview of your website’s average ranking on Bing for each keyword.

The Search Keywords report presents this data in a sortable table and a multi-axis graph, allowing you to chart keyword trends and ranking fluctuations over time. This helps you identify which keywords are performing well and which need improvement. By analysing these metrics, you can compare the performance of different keywords, find new opportunities, and focus on those with higher search volumes and better performance metrics. This data-driven approach guarantees you’re not guessing at keywords but using real data to optimise your SEO strategy.

To effectively utilise these tools, ensure your site is properly verified using methods such as an HTML meta tag, which is one of the verification options available in Bing Webmaster Tools. This verification step is crucial for gaining access to the detailed metrics and reports provided by the platform.

Guiding Content Strategy

When optimising your website for search engines, guiding your content strategy with data-driven insights is vital. To effectively use Bing Webmaster Tools for this purpose, focus on several key aspects of content quality and relevance.

Ensure your content is fresh, unique, and valuable, addressing specific topics in your niche and aligning with user search intent. Avoid machine-generated content that lacks originality, as it can be considered malicious and lead to penalties.

Incorporate exact match keywords and their synonyms naturally in your page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and body text. This helps Bing understand the context and relevance of your content, but be cautious to avoid keyword stuffing.

Given that Bing prioritises content quality and relevance, make sure your content is relevant to search intent while being unique and valuable to users. Use Bing Webmaster Tools to identify content gaps and conduct competitor analysis. Analyse your competitors’ content strategies to see where you can fill gaps and provide more thorough information. This tool also helps you track user engagement metrics, such as dwell time and click-through rates, which are vital for understanding how well your content is performing.

Optimise your on-page elements, including header tags, meta descriptions, and URL structure, to enhance readability and user experience. Proper formatting and clear headings help both users and Bing understand the hierarchy of your content.

Actionable SEO Recommendations

To optimise your website effectively, leveraging the actionable SEO recommendations provided by Bing Webmaster Tools is fundamental. Here are some key strategies to help you make the most out of these tools.

Site Scan and Technical SEO

Use the Site Scan feature to identify technical issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, and crawl errors. Here are three significant steps to follow:

  1. Schedule Regular Scans: Set up regular scans to maintain site health and address new technical issues promptly.
  2. Analyse Crawl Errors: Review crawl requests, errors, and indexed pages to guarantee proper site indexing.
  3. Implement Fixes: Follow the recommendations provided in the scan reports to resolve identified issues. Regular scans are crucial for maintaining a healthy site, especially given that Bing processes over 900 million searches daily.

URL Inspection and Indexing

The URL Inspection tool allows you to check the indexing status of specific URLs, inspect new pages, and identify any indexing issues. This tool is essential for providing quick visibility in Bing’s search results.

Keyword Research and Optimisation

Utilise Bing’s Keyword Research tool to find related keywords, analyse search trends, and refine your content strategy through keyword mapping. This helps you discover new content opportunities and optimise your titles and meta descriptions with exact match keywords.

Analyse your backlink profile to identify high-quality links, compare with competitors, and focus on building high-quality backlinks. Regularly monitoring new and lost links will help you maintain a healthy backlink profile, which is key for improving your ranking factors.

Detailed Error Reports

After optimising your website through regular site scans, URL inspections, and keyword research, the next step is to scrutinise the detailed error reports provided by Bing Webmaster Tools. These reports are essential for identifying and resolving issues that might be hindering your site’s performance.

URL Inspection Errors

The URL Inspection tool is a powerful feature that allows you to check if a URL is indexed and view any crawl errors. You can request Bing to crawl or re-crawl a specific page, especially after updates, using the “Request indexing” option. This tool also highlights SEO issues, such as missing alt attributes for images, and enables live URL testing to identify errors with crawling, indexing, or markup.

It provides detailed error messages and suggestions for resolution, including fixes for HTTP errors that prevent crawling. Utilising tools like Google Search Console can also help in analysing search queries and their impact on your site’s traffic.

Crawl Stats and Error Analysis

Bing Webmaster Tools offers extensive crawl stats that help you analyse crawl requests, crawl errors, and indexed pages. You can view the number of crawled pages and pages in the index over a specified period. The tool identifies crawl issues such as pages disallowed by ‘robots.txt’ and HTTP 400-499 errors that cannot be reproduced, allowing you to implement effective error resolution strategies.

Site Scan and SEO Reports

Performing a full site audit helps detect SEO issues across your site. Errors are categorised into low, moderate, and high severity to help you prioritise fixes. The reports highlight common issues like multiple tags or missing meta descriptions, along with warnings and notices for other issues. This thorough analysis enables you to identify and address crawl error identification and other SEO problems efficiently.

Technical SEO Check-up

Conducting a thorough technical SEO check-up is essential for guaranteeing your website’s ideal performance on Bing. The Site Scan feature in Bing Webmaster Tools is a powerful tool designed to help you identify and resolve technical SEO issues.

To initiate a site audit, you start a new scan in the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard. This scan checks for a variety of issues, including broken links, missing meta tags, and crawl errors. Here are some key aspects of the Site Scan feature:

  • Issue Identification: The scan detects common technical SEO issues such as unoptimised meta information, missing alt tags, and crawl errors that could prevent pages from being indexed correctly.
  • Detailed Reporting: You receive a detailed report outlining the issues found, their severity, and the number of pages affected, along with tailored recommendations for fixes.
  • Audit Scope: The tool crawls your site to check for these issues, guaranteeing your website is search engine and user-friendly.

The Site Scan feature is not just a one-time tool; you can schedule regular scans to maintain your site’s health and address new technical issues promptly. This proactive approach to issue resolution helps guarantee your website performs at its best and improves your organic search visibility over time. By using the Site Scan and other tools like URL Inspection, Robots.txt Testing, and Crawl Control, you can thoroughly manage and optimise your website’s technical SEO aspects.

Additionally, managing how Bingbot crawls your website with detailed controls, such as adjusting crawl rates and prioritising important pages, ensures Bingbot efficiently discovers your content.

Crawling and Indexing Insights

Having addressed the technical SEO issues with the Site Scan feature, you can now focus on ensuring your website is properly crawled and indexed by Bing. The new IndexNow Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools provides you with invaluable crawling and indexing insights to boost your URL visibility.

With IndexNow Insights, you can analyse top-level metrics and detailed reports on the number of URLs submitted, crawled, and indexed. This tool helps you understand the source of your URL submissions, whether through Cloudflare, WordPress, or manual submission, allowing you to optimise your content strategy based on these insights. IndexNow has reached 2.5 billion submitted URLs, a significant milestone that underscores its effectiveness.

You can monitor the status of your submitted URLs, including whether they were crawled and indexed, and get details on the latest 1,000 submitted URLs. The tool identifies issues with crawled URLs, such as content quality problems, robots disallowed, or deadlinks, and provides steps to fix them. It also highlights newly discovered links that are getting clicked but were not recently visible in IndexNow, helping you refine your optimisation strategies.

When it comes to enhancing your website’s SEO, analysing your backlink profile is essential for understanding your site’s authority and identifying opportunities for growth. This process involves a thorough assessment of the domains linking to your website, the pages and anchor text used, and the source and target URLs of these backlinks.

To conduct a detailed backlink profile analysis, you need to focus on several key areas:

Referring Domains and Quality

Analyse the number and quality of domains linking to your website. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz can help you evaluate the domain authority, relevance, and trust flow of these linking domains. Utilising Bing Webmaster Tools, you can generate reports on referring domains to compare backlink profiles with up to two competitors.

Competitor Comparison

Compare your backlink profile with up to two competitors to identify gaps and opportunities. This competitor analysis helps you discover domains that link to your competitors but not to your site, providing valuable insights into potential link building targets.

Anchor Text and Domain Authority

Examine the anchor text variations to guarantee a natural mix and avoid over-optimisation, which can lead to penalties. Evaluate the authority and relevance of linking domains to prioritise high-quality links and enhance your backlink diversity.

Bing Webmaster Tools offers a comprehensive suite of features to enhance your website’s SEO performance. By conducting thorough keyword research, monitoring search performance metrics, optimising on-page elements, and addressing technical issues, you can improve your site’s visibility on Bing. Regularly analysing backlink profiles and competitor insights further strengthens your SEO strategy.

Consistent use of these tools enables you to maintain a well-optimized website, leading to higher search engine rankings and an improved user experience. For more detailed guidance on utilising Bing Webmaster Tools for your SEO efforts, explore the platform’s extensive features and consider consulting additional resources to maximise its potential.

David Xu
David Xu

SEO strategist and digital marketing expert with a passion for helping businesses grow online. As Co-Founder of Better Ranking, David brings a wealth of experience in delivering tailored SEO solutions that drive measurable results. Skilled in optimising websites, enhancing user experiences, and creating impactful strategies for businesses of all sizes.

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