Bing vs. Google SEO: What’s the Difference?

March 22, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

We at CopyPress, and a lot of other marketing companies and professionals, talk a lot about Google SEO. We’ve got a good reason. Google is a big deal, being one of the largest search engines in the world and providing a host of other marketing, SEO, and web tools. But Google isn’t the one search engine out there. Bing accounts for 7.6% of desktop searches worldwide, and 2.88% of searches on all platforms. This makes it Google’s closest competitor (yes, really). So, for your marketing strategy, it’s worth it to learn the differences between Bing vs. Google SEO.

Differences Between Bing vs. Google SEO

Some of the primary differences between SEO for Bing and Google include:

Partnerships

Image via GIPHY

Google is like the cheese in the “Farmer in the Dell.” It stands alone. And the company can afford to do so. It’s got stakes in software and projects far beyond just its search engine. In contrast, Bing partners with dozens of other search engines and products to provide search services, such as:

Yahoo
AOL
DuckDuckGo
MSN
Lycos
Ecosia
Alexa voice search
Cortana voice search
Microsoft Office
Xbox
Siri (Sometimes)

This means that if you’re not searching on Google, you’re likely using another service that’s at least partially or sometimes powered by Bing. You can’t guarantee that your audience is always going to use Google search. That’s a pretty good argument for why it’s helpful to do SEO for both Google and Bing.

Backlinks

Google and Bing have pretty similar views on backlinks. Both search engines put a high value on trust. They don’t want to send their searchers to spammy sites that don’t give reputable information. Both value high-quality links over low-quality ones, but the criteria for how they judge quality is different. Google uses PageRank to determine which backlinks are most trustworthy. This service also treats quality backlinks and top-tier content as the most important factors of authority. Bing doesn’t put backlinks above all else, and it prefers smaller quantities of quality links than Google.

Bing doesn’t penalize for link-buying practices, which Google does. It also removes pages from the index if they don’t have enough links overall. Both services look for internal links with relevant anchor text, too. If you’re looking for the easiest and most successful way to build high-quality backlinks, start a call with CopyPress. Our content syndication services can help get your content in front of the right people at the right time and claim that all-important quality link juice for your pieces.

Keywords

Google is at the front of the semantic search movement. This process uses machine learning to understand searcher intent and interpret context clues from websites to learn more about the information. Bing followed this practice in 2014 when it abandoned an old method of using meta keywords for ranking. It’s still trying to catch up to Google with broad-matching keywords.

As of now, Google puts more emphasis on strategically created pages that build topic relevance around keywords. Bing still encourages people to focus on exact match keywords without “over-optimizing.” If that sounds vague, consider using Bing’s keyword tool to help you learn exactly what they’re looking for and what they mean.

Multimedia

Multimedia is an area where Bing outperforms Google. Bing’s visual search uses “entity understanding” to crawl multimedia accurately and “recognize” information in content like images, video, and even audio clips just by their visuals. Google, instead, relies most heavily on text-based content. That’s why it recommends including alt-text in your images and transcripts for multimedia like videos and audio content.

Social Media

Google often denies that it uses social signals, like web page shares or overall social media presence of a brand, as a role in page ranking. Bing, in contrast, is open about the fact that it uses social signals when ranking content. In fact, this is a key factor in determining which pages appear highest in search engine results pages (SERPs).

When ranking with Bing, it’s important to be present and popular on social media. This may be something you already do but haven’t considered as part of your SEO strategy before. If this is a brand new concept, now may be the time to learn how to do social listening and create a social presence.

Image via GIPHY by @SkyTV

These are just some of the basic differences between the two search engines. There are even more technical SEO specifications that may help you prepare your online content to be top-ranking on both services. If you’re looking for more information on how you can do this kind of SEO and other important processes in content marketing and syndication, sign up for the CopyPress newsletter. We provide informative articles and actionable tips and tricks to help make your website and all its content the best it can be.

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Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer