With the end of the year upon us, inbound marketers need to boost the performance of marketing campaigns in order to achieve full, year-end growth. Using Bing as part of that strategy might not normally make marketers' lists of top choice tactics, but with a 30% market share, it's not really something you should ignore. Yesterday, we discussed 6 reasons to use Bing for paid search, and in this article, we'll provide you with 5 additional reasons why Bing is great for improving organic search results, too.
1. Improved Webmaster Tools Crawl Settings
Bing's Crawl Setting feature has been upgraded so users can set the crawl faster during peak business hours and slower during off-peak hours. There are also some useful drag-and-drop functionality improvements.
2. A Rewritten Index Explorer for SEO
Bing has completely rewritten the Index tracker backend and, among other changes, new sites will have access to Index Explorer data the moment they sign up. This update focuses on:
- Freshness
- Performance
- Extensibility
- Reduced machine footprint
- Stability and failure detection
3. Helpful Search Dashboard and Data Export Feature
The Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard contains key statistical data and chart data about your site’s performance in search. Pointer icons indicate the trending and stat categories. You can also export and download the data to a .csv file.
4. User and Role Management Webmaster Tools
Often, a website has multiple contributors. One of the great features of Bing Webmaster Tools is that site owners can now grant better access to other users for their site with administrative, read and/or write, or read-only access. There is also the option of providing users with partial access to just some sections of your site, such as sub-domains or folders.
5. Self-Help Guides
New, detailed self-help guides provide how-to documents to cover a wide range of topics that go beyond how to use Bing Webmaster Tools and include recommendations on SEO, link building, redirects, and more. Visit the Bing Webmaster Tools Help Page or the Official Bing Webmaster Blog, or learn more about Bing's Webmaster Tools in this free guide.
Have you used Bing for organic search? What other reasons do you have for using Bing in your organic SEO strategy?
This a guest post written by Donald Nosek, VP business development at ymarketing, a full service digital marketing agency and sponsor at this year's HubSpot User Group Summit.
Image Credits: Manuel Iglesias and TechNet
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shriharsha bhat 1:27 AM on September 15, 2011
I agree with Donald. We certainly need alternatives to Google. Think about it, almost 30% of searchers use Bing. If we could tap into this, then the no of visits or leads generated would definitely increase for every website! The key to increasing visits or leads is to utilize every aspect of search engines.
Particia 4:59 AM on September 15, 2011
30% Really? That's interesting. Everyone usually plays on Google's playground. With that share it WOULD BE unwise not to consider optimization for it. And that would make it a niche search engine where domination is WAY easier. I have to have a look at this more in depth.
Блоггер Xstroy 5:45 AM on September 15, 2011
That's interesting. Bing has a large share of the search market in the world, but do not want to go to Russia. Why?
Google for one year, became a Russian why this large growing market is not interested in Bing?
hasan 7:55 AM on September 15, 2011
Thank you for providing useful information in this blog, and I'll try it
nakliyat 12:53 PM on September 15, 2011
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Digital Ninja 11:56 PM on September 18, 2011
30% definitely bears consideration but for us (located in Canada) the gap is much more dramatic. Having direct access to analytics I can safely say well over 90% of canadians us Google (.CA) as their default browser. I guess were pretty on-sided up here ...