#marketingminute , Bing 2022 Addition! Have you Bing'ed your store name lately? Today we're talking about Bing, a search engine that is growing each year and has been coming up in marketing conversations lately!

What is Bing?

Bing is Microsoft's search engine and a competitor to Google. It's not nearly as popular, but it is the default search engine built into Microsoft Windows and heavily used by offices and professionals around the world.

Bing also powers the Cortana voice assistant, one of the competitors to Alexa.

Because it is an entirely different search engine owned by a different company, the results you will see in a Bing search will be different from what you see in Google.

The Punchmark platform, from a technical SEO perspective, is optimized equally for Google and Bing, following search engine best practices.

To over-simplify: Google is 97-98% of all search engine traffic. Bing is 2-3%.

https://backlinko.com/bing-users

There are a few things your product or marketing team could be doing to optimize for Bing.

Bing Webmaster

Are you familiar with Google Search Console? Bing has their own version called Bing Webmaster Tools. Just like how Google Search Console monitors and measures your technical performance in Google, so too does Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing.

https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about

One thing I would suggest every online jewelry store do is log in to and claim your Bing Webmaster Tools account, if you haven't already, and then on a quarterly basis log in and review performance logs for any technical hiccups, soft 404s, insights from local search queries and traffic, etc.

In addition, Bing Webmaster Tools has an area for you to submit your sitemap.xml file to it. This tells Bing and Bing's bots what pages are listed on your website, and instructs them to come and crawl your site.

Bing Ads

Bing also has their own ads platform, just like Google Ads. It is very similar to how Google Ads looked and operated years ago, back when they were called Google Adwords.

https://ads.microsoft.com/

If you are noticing that other companies are bidding on your brand or store name in the Bing Search Engine, running the same campaign structure that we recommend (Brand, Services, Remarketing, Competitor) in Bing Ads is very simple for you to set up and would only require an additional advertising budget (since Bing can't take Google's advertising money, of course).

Put the usual filters in place for your campaigns, such as time of day, days of week, local area zip codes or radius targeting, and negative key phrases for national competitor names.

Is It Worth Spending Money and Time on Bing?

It can be! In our experience, there are fewer searches happening on Bing monthly, but the costs associated with ads on Bing are often less.

I would advise not spending too much time on Bing, but don't forget about it. A quick glance at a dozen Punchmark websites shows most have Bing traffic accounts for less than 1% of all visitors to a jewelry website.

A few hours every couple months is more than enough time to optimize for Bing organically.

The key thing to remember is that it's most often office workers during a 9-5 job who use Bing the most, or older customers 65+ who have a newer Microsoft Windows computer, so if you target your ads to those demographics and keep expectations reasonable, it can be a good channel for advertising.

Is Your Store Seeing Bing Traffic?

Have you seen much traffic and sales coming from Bing in your analytics? If you're interested in having Punchmark set up your Bing Ads account and manage your Bing Ads, reach out to me at Stuart at punchmark dot com or via Facebook Messenger!