What’s the Difference Between Bing & Google SEO?

When it comes to marketing, much of it involves ensuring our clients’ content ends up as high up in the SERPs as possible. Where position number one is the most sought-after spot on Google, there are also opportunities for you to rank highly on Bing, if you can’t quite do it on Google. So what are the main differences between the two and which one should you be trying to rank highly in based on the content you’re producing? 

Partnerships

Google is almost its own entity, and the company itself can afford to keep it that way, financially. It has stakes in software that span far beyond that of its search engine, whereas it’s a different story for Bing. Bing looks to partner with several other search engines in order to provide more services to their users, such as:

• Yahoo
• AOL
• DuckDuckGo
• MSN
• Microsoft Office
• Siri
• Alexa voice search 
• Xbox

Backlinks

Google and Bing treat backlinks in much the same way. Both search engines place a high level of trust on what you’re linking to, and vice-a-versa. They don’t want readers to click on links that lead to spam sites, for example. As such, the trust in your content will fall, causing it to rank lower than it would have done had a reputable link been added instead. With regards to differences between the two, there aren’t many differences with regards to this, just make sure you’re using reliable sources to link to and you should be able to rank highly on either search engine.

Keywords & phrases

Google uses the semantic search movement approach. This, in essence, uses machine learning in a bid to understand searcher intent. It also enables interpretations of context clues from certain websites in order to learn more information, much like AI. Bing used to follow this practice, but soon abandoned its use in 2014. 

So Bing doesn’t operate on keywords or phrases within written content, like Google would. If you’re looking to rank on Google, do keyword research and include that in your content creation. However, if you’re looking to rank on Bing, then stick to more visual content pieces as opposed to text-based content.

Multimedia

It’s argued that Bing outperforms Google in this sense. Bing will use something called ‘entity understanding’ to crawl multimedia as accurately as possible. In turn, this allows it to almost recognise, so to speak, information within certain content pieces, such as images, videos and more based on their visuals alone.

Google, on the other hand, relies more on text-based content, which is why it’s recommended that you include alt text in images and transcripts for visual content. To conclude, Bing puts more emphasis on multimedia content, whereas Google would rather stick to text-based content. If your content is heavily visual, then stick with trying to rank on Bing as it might be far easier.

Social media

Bing has admitted to the fact that it uses social signals to rank content accordingly in its search engine, whereas Google claims that this is something they don’t do. But it actually plays an integral role in how well content ranks, whether it be via Bing or Google. If you’re looking to rank on Bing through your social media posts and entries, you’ll need to be not only popular, but present as well. This is often used as part of a basic SEO strategy. Essentially, the main differences are that Google will see Facebook and Twitter pages as indexed pages, whereas Bing will display Facebook friends’ and Twitter followers’ ratings of businesses they’ve supported for example.

To conclude…

Although there are a few basic differences between the two search engines, there are some more complex, technical differences which need to be accounted for also, as already discussed. Once you understand what those differences are, you’ll be better placed to know exactly how to optimise content for Google and how to do it for Bing. However, people generally go with Google as it’s the number one used search engine, according to HubSpot, with over 80% of those asked saying that they’d rather use that than Bing.

Kumo Digital is a forward-thinking digital marketing agency with over two decades of experience behind us. We are able to provide unrivalled services including SEO, PPC, content creation and website design and development. For more information about how we can help to set your business apart from your competitors, get in touch with a member of our dedicated, professional team today – we’re always pleased to hear from you.