While Microsoft Bing sees nice market share gains after releasing their new Bing Chatbot feature, it still has a long way to go before it can catch up with Google’s market dominance.
That said, we can start taking advantage of Bing’s increasing user volume. On the local SEO side, this means turning to Bing Places to test if optimizing on that platform can help generate more local traffic.
The question is: Is spending time optimizing for Bing Places worth it? If it is worth it, what optimizations will have the biggest impact on rankings?
To find out, my team and I tested optimizing some client listings on Bing and measuring the impact.
Should you claim and optimize a Bing Places listing?Every business should claim and set up their Bing Places listing.
Single-location businesses can easily import their Google Business Profile (GBP) information to Bing. Just ensure all fields are correctly filled out.
Bing only syncs GBP accounts with less than 10 listings, so multi-location businesses with 10+ listings must use a bulk upload file instead.
Claiming and optimizing a multi-location business’ Bing Places listingsWe started our test with a client with multiple physical locations. After claiming and optimizing their Bing Places listings (including adding keywords to the name), we saw website traffic and conversions increase almost immediately.
How did we do it? We identified all the client’s listings on Bing Places, claimed and fully optimized them to match the GBP listings. We added UTM tags to the website URLs to track all the traffic in Google Analytics.
Some edits we made took a few attempts to stick, but ultimately, they worked. We then kicked it up a notch and tested two more advanced SEO tactics – incorporating keywords and fighting spam.
Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
“> “> “>Processing…Please wait.
SUBSCRIBESee terms.
function getCookie(cname) { let name = cname + "="; let decodedCookie = decodeURIComponent(document.cookie); let ca = decodedCookie.split(';'); for(let i = 0; i
