Use Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools

Today we’re going to talk about adding your site to Bing Webmaster Tools to expand your search and traffic potential.

While Google dominates online searches, many Microsoft Windows users still prefer Bing’s search engine.

Bing also powers Yahoo’s search engine, and the two combined account for about 4% of all US searches.

So ignoring Bing is the same as overlooking a significant sized pool of potential customers.

Do so at your own loss.

In addition, Bing’s Webmaster Tools are very SEO friendly and can easily help you optimize your website and its content.

Let’s look at 15 valuable tools that Bing provides that you should evaluate and use to help optimize your site and its ability to attract traffic.

1. Submit your XML sitemap to help Bing find all of your pages and posts. This section will also let you see if any sitemap errors or warnings exist and the total URLs discovered.

This section will also provide your current sitemap status, the last crawl date, and all URLs discovered.

2. Bing’s webmaster tool home page provides your site’s search performance. It will show the keywords you’re getting impressions for, with clicks, CTR, and average position.

It will show your top pages by impressions with clicks, CTR, average position and you can sort by these metrics.

Search performance will also show how many of your pages are indexed by Bing.

3. There’s a URL inspection tool – which provides if the page is indexed and if any SEO issues are found and if schema markup is present on that page. It will even show you the page’s code for specific errors so you can easily inspect it.
4. Bing will show you all pages that are over 125kb with a statement that they risk not being fully cached. This means that page file size is large and likely to be slow to load.
5. Its Site explorer tool will show pages indexed, those with errors and warnings, and how many URLs are excluded – because of your robots.txt file. You can use this section to request re-indexing of a URL also.

In site explorer, you can filter the data to examine:

• indexed URLs
• no-index URLs
• crawling issues
• redirecting URLs
• server errors
• robots.txt disallowed
• canonicals – which is the page you want Bing to use in cases of similar or duplicate content pages

6. There’s a URL submission section – use this to submit new pages and posts created to get them indexed quickly.
7. Next up in the Bing dashboard is an SEO section.

Here you can examine all backlinks found with the referring domains, the URL they’re pointing to, and the different anchor texts being used.

8. Next is their keyword research tool – type in a keyword, pick country and language, and device type, and it will show you the Bing SERP for that KW with trends graph and impressions count.

It provides related keywords, question keywords, and newly discovered keywords.

This is a valuable tool for seeing what’s being searched for in Bing.

9. Next up is their SEO Reports section, which provides pages on your site with common errors and how severe the errors are. This is a quick and easy route to fixing pages for better rankings. This section is auto-generated weekly.

10. The last part of the SEO section is their Site Scan tool which also looks for pages with errors and warnings and allows you to request a new scan with new settings.

11. The next section is Configuration which allows you to set the time your site can be crawled to avoid the busiest traffic time.

12. There’s a block URLs section that allows you to do just as the title says, block URLs from appearing in Bing search results. You can also do this by setting those pages as NO-INDEX and adding them as such in your robots.txt file. This section is more for new pages just created that you don’t want to risk being indexed and want to block immediately.

13. The Tools & Enhancements section includes a Robots.txt tester to see if there are any errors in your file. You’ll also see the code in your file to ensure you’ve included everything you want and need in there. This area also includes a BingBot verifier to see if certain IP traffic in your logs is coming from Bingbot.

14. Their Security & Privacy section shows any Copyright notices you’ve received that cite URLs that violate someone else’s copyright. This area also provides for your User Management to manage your account and assign them roles.

15. The last tool available is the Microsoft Clarity Option which allows you to add your site as a project and then provides analytics + user behavior and heatmaps to see where people are clicking and how far they scroll down on a page.

You’ll have to add some code to your website to enable this. It’s a simple process of adding code to your site’s <head> section, much like Google Analytics or Tag Manager.

Here you’ll also get to see the following analytics:

• dead clicks – those with no action after click – usually a dead link
• rage clicks – fast clicking on the same object
• quick backs – bounces
• popular pages
• sessions – pages per session – scroll depth – time engagement
• referrers
• devices
• browsers used
• OS systems used
• Countries for traffic
• heat maps – where are they clicking
• scroll meta maps which shows what percent of users reached different points of a page

Alright, I hope that helped some of you. Thanks for sharing your time and attention with us today.

Good luck out there and create a great day!