Easy methods to get extra site visitors with Bing Analytics
It's easy to forget that Google isn't the only search engine.
Sure, it dominates the market. In the time it took you to read those two and a half sentences, Google processed around 280,000 searches.
However, you should also look beyond Google when it comes to driving traffic to your website.
Take Bing, for example. It has a 2.83% share of the global search market. Its search engine supports Yahoo, which holds 1.65% of the market share. Together that is just under 5%. Do you want to miss 5% of the global search market?
If not, you should focus on Bing and Bing Analytics to increase your web traffic.
What is Bing Analytics?
We all know Google Analytics. It's the tool we rely on to track and analyze our traffic. So you'd assume Bing would have a direct equivalent, but that's not the case.
Bing Analytics does not technically exist (although Bing itself returns nearly 40 million results for the term "Bing Analytics"). What exists is the Bing Webmaster Tools, a dashboard with a number of Google Analytics-like features. However, it is more similar to the Google Search Console.
When I say "Bing Analytics" in this article, I am referring to all of the content in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Why do you need to review Bing Analytics?
If Bing is a major traffic source for your website, or you hope it will, the website's analytics tools will help maximize your search performance.
Bing Webmaster Tools has many features to help you improve your rankings and get more traffic from Bing.
I'm not going to give you an in-depth guide to the Webmaster Tools features included here, but we're going to review the key aspects of Bing Analytics and show you how they work.
Insights from Bing & Yahoo
The Google Search Console only allows you to examine your search performance on Google. Sure, that's a lot of data. But it's not the whole story.
The Bing Analytics in Webmaster Tools helps fill in some gaps by combining data from Bing and Yahoo. That means you can see the impressions, clicks, rankings, and specific keywords that users from two different search engines bring to your website (and a lot more).
Submit your sitemap
By submitting your sitemap to Bing, you make it easier for the search engine to crawl and index your website. This makes it more likely that searchers will find your content and services.
You can view any sitemaps that you have submitted to Bing through the Webmaster Tools. And it's easy to submit a new sitemap from the webmaster dashboard.
Control Bing's crawling speed
Is your website getting a lot of traffic at certain times? For example, if your website has a lot of traffic on weekday mornings, you don't want search crawlers to put even more load on your servers.
This is why the Crawl Control feature in Bing Analytics is so useful. This is a great way to let Bing know when you are busiest. So you can ask a caller to call you back later when you're not working. Note that you cannot do this in the new Google Search Console.
Downgrade sitelinks
Sitelinks, or "deep links" for using Bing terminology, are links that appear just below a website's main list on the Search Engine Results (SERP) page.
Here's what they look like on Bing:
Google does not give you control over the sitelinks displayed. Bing does. Webmaster allows you to block individual pages from appearing as sitelinks.
Suppose I don't want my 10 Powerful Instagram Marketing Tips article to appear on a sitelink anymore. Maybe it's not relevant to my current strategy and it doesn't make sense for it to appear so prominently in SERPs. I can control that with Bing.
Set up geo-targeting
You can't do good local search engine optimization without geo-targeting. This feature allows you to tell search engines which parts of your website you want users to see in different locations.
All of your Bing geo targeting needs can be found in Webmaster Tools. For an entire domain, a subdomain, a directory or a single page, simply enter the URL and select the desired target country or region.
Of course, you can do the same thing using the Google Search Console, but it's a lot more cumbersome. It's important to geo-target on Google and Bing.
Connect social accounts and app stores
Your online presence may not begin and end with your website.
You likely have multiple social profiles or your products are available in all major app stores.
These pages are a huge part of your brand. Wouldn't it be great if there was an easy way to see how many impressions and clicks you are getting from them?
Thanks to Bing Analytics, this is possible. Linking your social and app profiles gives you an extra insight into how people find you online.
Understand how Bing sees your website
The world of search algorithms and ranking factors can be quite impenetrable. Sometimes the search engines seem to do everything they can to make life more confusing.
Wouldn't it be great if you could open the lid of a search engine and see what it sees?
You can do just that with the Bing Analytics Index Explorer. It shows you how Bing sees your site, organized in a series of folders and files in the Windows Explorer style.
This feature is an easy way to find all of the data Bing collected while crawling your website so you can determine which errors need fixing. If Bing's crawlers encounter a series of redirects, blocked URLs, or malware-infected pages, you can use Index Explorer to find out.
How to add Bing Analytics to your website
Adding the Bing Analytics review to your website is a simple process. Go to the Webmaster Tools website, sign in to a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. You then have two options:
- Import from the Google Search Console: If the search console has already reviewed your website, you can skip any additional review with Bing.
- Add your site manually: You need to make noticeable changes to your website in order for Bing to review you.
Bing offers four ways to check your website:
- Sign in to your hosting provider account for automatic verification
- Upload the XML file to your web server
- Add a custom meta tag to the home page of your website
- Edit your site's CNAME record with a custom verification code
Increase your traffic with Bing Analytics
Here are some of my favorite tips for using the Bing Analytics webmaster tools features to increase your organic traffic.
Find low hanging fruit with SEO reports
Google Analytics and Search Console are great, but it can be difficult to tell what changes will affect your search rankings.
In contrast, Bing Analytics runs automated reports that flag areas on your website that do not follow Bing SEO best practices.
Better still, the SEO reports feature ranks problems by severity (either Low, Medium, or High). Here is how often the error occurs on your website and how many pages are affected.
But remember, it won't do all of your SEO work for you. Even if you make every change Bing recommends, you won't automatically get to the top of the leaderboard.
For example, you will not be told if your backlink profile is weaker than that of your competitors or if you are targeting the wrong keywords.
However, it's fantastic for identifying common issues that can affect your search performance, such as: B. missing title tags or multiple H1s on the same page.
View SEO improvements page by page
You don't have to look for SEO improvements just at the website level, however. Bing Analytics also offers a page-level tool called SEO Analyzer. Enter a URL from your website and Bing compares it to roughly 15 SEO best practices.
Interestingly, you can even use it on pages that aren't indexed. So if you're creating a new campaign landing page but don't want to crawl it yet, you can still check that all the correct SEO boxes are ticked.
Rate your mobile phone friendliness
Around half of all web traffic is on mobile devices. This has been the case for the past three years. So there is no excuse that your website is not cell-friendly right now.
Like Google, Bing offers a mobile usability test in the webmaster, which analyzes how well your website works on mobile devices. You can use it to analyze any website, not just your properties. Hence, it is also useful for checking in with competitors.
It should be noted here that Bing does not place as much emphasis on mobile friendliness as Google. While Google has switched to mobile-first indexing for all websites, Bing has no plans to follow suit.
On the other hand, Bing treats user experience as a ranking factor, unlike Google. If mobile users are having a terrible time on your website and immediately bounce, your rankings are likely to suffer.
Look for keywords on page two
The job of an SEO is to have the greatest impact on a website's organic traffic with the time and resources available.
Bing Analytics lets you use the Search Terms tool to identify terms that you place right next to Page 1 of the SERPs (i.e. positions 11-20).
These keywords are likely to generate very little organic traffic for you right now as few searchers make it past the first page. But they're not far away and a little tweaking could make all the difference.
Analyze the pages these terms appear on, look at the websites above you, and figure out how to skip them. You may need a few more high quality backlinks or you may need to optimize your content.
Do keyword research
Once you've found all of the low hanging fruits by fixing simple mistakes and tweaking the keywords on page two, it's time to explore new possibilities.
To do this, you need to start with keyword research. And did you know that Bing is the only search engine that offers an organic data-based keyword research tool?
Better yet, this data comes from searches on Bing and Yahoo!
Bing's keyword research tool has some useful features. It shows you:
- Organic search volumes for a specific keyword: Helps identify if a particular keyword has enough search volume to be worth targeting.
- Related keywords: Bing uses your "startup keyword" to suggest other relevant terms and their search volume.
- Results filtered by country, region or language: You can even select multiple countries with the same language, e.g. B. USA, UK and Australia.
When it comes to search engine keyword tools, Bing is one of the most powerful tools, but it doesn't offer advanced insights into a specific tool like Ubersuggest.
Conclusion
Ask 100 people on the street to name a search engine. Probably everyone says "Google".
Just because Bing isn't a front runner doesn't mean website owners can afford to ignore it. It still processes billions of searches per month, so you need to include it in your ongoing SEO analysis.
If you are serious about getting traffic from Bing, you need to use Bing Analytics.
Which of the Bing analytics features and tips are you looking forward to the most?