Yes you do need to understand Bing to get the most out of SEO and while there are far more people using Google there are still a significant number using Bing and it makes no sense to ignore these potential customers when doing your SEO.
Don’t always assume that work works for Google works for Bing this is less and less the case and to best illustrate this ewe need to look at what influences how Bing arrange their results.
Click-rate is a major part of how Bing decide on what to show and things like trust factors are not as important as in Google. This means for your SEO to be effective you need to choose highly relevant keywords and then choose highly relevant titles and descriptions, you should do this for Google anyway but this is more important in Bing.
It isn’t just click rate though Bing use defect markers to mark when a site that is being clicked on may not match the query people are searching for, this means that you can’t just use a title and meta description relevant to a search to get people on to a landing page that actually has little to do with the search query or doesn’t answer a more specific query. The problem for your SEO if you don’t follow this is that Bing actually look at engagement with your site and the elements of your site include, text, images and videos to decide if there is a defect and may actually block your page from appearing at all.
In short if Bing detect a site that is trying to trick people into clicking on it you could get blocked for that term so with your Search Engine Optimizaion it is important to be honest and go only after very relevant keywords and watch out for ambiguous terms or you may just waste your time.
Bing also believe that the wrong results will distract people, they therefore like to make sure that on searches where a large percentage of people are looking for one site that no video or picture results distract people and typically the first few results will be from one site as with searches for a specific store name like Amazon. This means it can be difficult to compete on brand related keywords, this includes where you are selling someone else’s brand which they also sell online and so your SEO may need to focus on Google, or go for PPC.
Don’t then assume that by making your page the most relevant and obviously related to a search term you will rank where you would expect or where you might on Google; Bing’s search algorithm decides that someone wants one of one, two or three authority sites and you might be ranked in the top five before their defect detector comes into play but your hard work on Search Engine Optimization will be for nil if the detector decides to block you.
Bing will continue it seems to go in their own direction with their algorithms in order to beat Google and you may need to increase attention to how to rank in Bing with landing pages for Google and separate landing pages for Bing becoming more common.
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