Should I Monitor Bing SEO? 8 Reasons it Matters in 2025
Reading Time: 6 minutes Google accounts for 90% of global search volume and has become synonymous with SEO. You’ve probably heard that Bing gets only 3% of global searches.
As a result, some marketers conclude that it isn’t worth the time to optimize or monitor Bing SEO. While both statistics are correct, it’s good to analyze the data before making a decision.
In North America, Bing is stronger than you think, accounting for 24% of desktop searches. Bing powers many smaller search engines, and its traffic is more valuable than Google’s. Bing users are typically better educated and wealthier than Google users.
When a client has Bing Webmasters integrated, we include that in every SEO audit. We’ve found unusual issues that harmed search ranking. For example, one robots.txt file was built just for Google, so Bing indexed thousands of pages that were supposed to be blocked (private). Ignoring Bing can have unintended consequences.
Why You Should Monitor Bing SEO (8 Things)
The Basics: Bing is a search engine owned by Microsoft. While officially known as Microsoft Bing, it is commonly referred to as simply Bing. It was first released on June 3, 2009. And it is a derivative of MSN Search and Live Search.
Here are eight reasons to monitor Bing traffic and SEO rank.
1. Bing Powers Many Search Engines
When the 3% market share figure is mentioned, it refers exclusively to Bing’s global search volume. But Bing actually powers many smaller search engines.
Bing search powers the following search platforms, in whole or in part:
- Yahoo search (since 2012)
- DuckDuckGo (since 2010)
- Ecosia (since 2017)
- AOL
- Cortana & Alexa
- MSN
- Lycos
- Search.com
- Microsoft Edge Browsers
- Bing Places
- Windows Devices: 1.5 billion Windows devices have the Bing search engine baked into the interface. It is also integrated with Microsoft Office, Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, Skype, Xbox
Overlook Bing and you also miss all these other search engines.
2. Bing Search Has Clout
While Bing isn’t the primary search engine in North America, the data reveals some interesting stats. Globally, Bing-powered searches account for 5.72% of search volume, almost double the often quoted stat of 3%. This includes the search engines listed above.
But it gets more interesting. Looking at just North American desktop searches, Bing-powered search engines account for 24.4% of search volume. This compares with Google’s 75.19%.
And for many North American businesses, North America is their largest market. As a publisher for 15+ years, I have found that desktop searches are more valuable—they are more commercial and generate more ad revenue. More on this in point 4.
If you run a business in Canada or the United States, it would be a mistake to overlook such a lucrative source of potential customers.
Here are the stats and sources.
- All Platforms (Global): Google has 91.04% vs Bing-powered search engines at 5.72%. Bing-powered search engines include: Bing 3.86%, Yahoo 1.24%, DuckDuckGo 0.62%
- Desktop (Global): Google has 80.35% vs Bing-powered search engines at 15.72%. Bing-powered search engines include: Bing 11.81%, Yahoo 3.05%, DuckDuckGo 0.86%
- Desktop (North America): Google has 75.19% vs Bing-powered search engines at 24.4%. Bing-powered search engines include: Bing 17.78%, Yahoo 4.2%, DuckDuckGo 2.23%, AOL 0.19%
Stats are current as of July 2024, according to StatCounter.com
3. Where Bing Powered Search is Popular
While Bing adoption is low globally, some areas have a higher use rate. If your target market includes these areas, it is probably worth monitoring Bing SEO and optimizing for it.
- Japan: Yahoo! Japan*
- Taiwan: Yahoo! Taiwan*
- China: Bing with 14.95% market share
- North America: 24.4% of desktop searches on Bing
*Source: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
4. Bing Earnings
Since 2009, we’ve run a portfolio of content sites. And every year, we compare the value of traffic from different search engines.
Here are the RPMs (Revenue per 1000 visitors) from last month on our site, Storyteller Tech.
- Yahoo: $41.69 RPM
- Bing: $33.54 RPM
- DuckDuckGo: $25.31 RPM
- Google: $10.10 RPM
While site traffic is similar across many of these platforms, there is a dramatic difference in earnings. Not only is each visitor worth more money from Bing-powered search, but we also generate more traffic from each of them.
5. Bing User Demographics
While still small compared to Google, Bing still posts some impressive user numbers.
- Daily Active Users on Bing: 100,000,000 via Bing blog
- Bing Ad Revenue: $6.24 billion, according to eMarketer
Bing users are typically better educated and wealthier than Google users.
Here are the current user data (United States) on the Microsoft Advertising Network for Search.
- 54% are under 45 years of age
- 50% are married
- 58% have children living at home
- 49% graduated from college
- 41% have a household income in the top 25%
- 33% report having a disability
- 100% of users have purchased a product or service online in the last week
Source: Microsoft Advertising This page has specific stats for Auto, B2B, Finance, Travel.
6. Local Bing Rankings: Bing Places
Bing Places is a free directory for local businesses.
You can claim or create your business on Bing Places and import your Google Business Profile details, making it very easy to set up.
Here’s more about setting up your Bing Business Listing.
7. Bing SEO Tips
The Bing algorithm is very similar to Google’s, in that it learns and adapts dynamically.
It bases ranking on relevance, reputation, user engagement, freshness, location and language, and page load time.
I don’t think it even makes sense for us to talk about the top five ranking factors, the model is changing all the time, so you get new data from the web, you get new user behaviors; even the same query doesn’t mean the same thing in 2019 as it does in 2021.
Frédéric Dubut, principal project PM manager, core search & AI at Microsoft, via Search Engine Land
That being said, Bing values many of the same factors as other search engines. Specifically, here are some tips to focus on when optimizing for Bing search.
- Focus on on-page SEO
- Build quality backlinks
- Generate social signals to your content
- Optimize for Local SEO
- Focus on brand-building
- Create quality, unique content
- Claim, Optimize, and Monitor Bing Webmasters: more on this in the next section
I’ll be covering these Bing ranking factors in detail in a future post.
8. How to Monitor Bing SEO
To begin, Register for Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places (if you are a local business) to begin optimizing and monitoring Bing for SEO.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a tool similar to Google Search Console (GSC). It monitors site health in organic Bing results. As your SEO improves, this will be an important monitoring and optimization tool.
You can submit your XML sitemap inside Webmaster Tools. This ensures that Bing can discover all your content. If you already have your site submitted to GSC, you can import those details (including your sitemap) into Bing Webmaster Tools.
Bing Webmasters monitors search traffic for their own platform (Bing.com) and most of the other Bing-powered search platforms, including Yahoo.
What is the future of Bing SEO?
It is hard to say with certainty. But based on the current mess of Google search results (thanks to HCU algorithm updates), I expect that we’ll see Bing use continue to grow.
Are you monitoring your traffic and SEO with Bing? If you need help optimizing your page for search, please reach out. We offer SEO Site Audits and other SEO consulting services that increase traffic and revenue.
